University, puts our educational work in the strongest possible light,
and in the briefest space, thus: "The Banner Church in Education."
That the Methodist Episcopal Church is indeed "the banner Church in
education" the following facts bear witness:
From 1784, the year of its organization, to 1884, the Methodist
Episcopal Church established 225 classical seminaries and colleges; in
other words, established a classical seminary or college every fifth
month through a hundred toilsome years. No other organization in human
history ever made so honorable a record in the higher education, or was
entitled to celebrate so jubilant a centennial. If we go back through
the stormy period of the Revolution to the first feeble beginnings of
American Methodism in 1766, we must add to the above-mentioned 225
institutions belonging to the Church the 58 known schools of more
private ownership, to get the true aggregate of Methodist institutions
for the higher education, namely, 283, a little more than one for every
fifth month through the first 118 years of our existence as a Church,
infancy included.
Is it not time to bury the ancient allegation that the early Methodists
were indifferent or hostile to learning? If the long-standing slander
must live on to the end of time, let us once in a hundred years lift it
gently into the pillory of ecumenical publicity and placard it as an
instructive example of immortal mendacity.
CONCLUSION.
What shall we now say of universal Methodism?
Of the millions reached by her ministry we have heard. The sun never
sets on her domain, for it is "from the rivers to the ends of the
earth." Her people are found in every land and are at home in every
zone. "All climates embrace them--the winters of Hudson's Bay, and the
sun-scorched plains of India. The Pacific waves break upon their shores,
and peaks crowned with eternal snow shadow their dwellings." As she
enters upon the twentieth century there should be no "wrinkle upon her
brow, no haze in her vision, no stoop to her form, no halt to her step,
giving signs of wasted energy or declining vigor;" and this will be her
history if the anointing of her founder abides upon her. Her sanctuaries
will be Bethesdas, and her prayer meetings Bethels. "She will gather in
the street Arab, and send missionaries to Orient fields of toil and
death." Her doctrines will be as when Wesley died; her philanthropy as
broad, her relations to other churches as catholic, as when he said,
"The world is my parish."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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