three grades; and they inaugurated a "Methodist Episcopal Church." 8. As to the logical grounds of Mr. Wesley's ordination, we endeavored to show four years ago the following points: 1. After Mr. Wesley's reading of Lord King, both he and the British Conference still avowed the belief that there are three proper orders in the New Testament, which are not, however, necessary to the absolute validity of a Church. 2. Nevertheless, the eldership is essentially the one order from which the other two are derivative. Not that a number of elders have a right to get together and ordain a bishop when they please. If they have the right, it is not right for them ordinarily to use the right. Wesley declared, in 1755, that it would be disorderly for him to so ordain, and yet when the "call" came his ordination was right. He, then, professedly, as being himself a regularly ordained elder in the Church of God, performed, under the due extraordinary call, that ordaining act, the power to which inheres in the eldership. 3. It was the rise of a people formed by God requiring his ordaining action that presented the providential call. The charismatic call was not a miraculous inspiration, but essentially, we suppose, of the same nature as a call to the ministry, being, in fact, within the scope of his call to his wide ministry. And our Discipline has from the beginning contained both the statement that our episcopacy is orders," and that in the eldership inheres the right to ordain bishops when the entire episcopate becomes vacant, and that the eldership and laity may by full and formal process modify or abolish the episcopacy. 66 9. Wesley's ordaining act American Methodism accepted, but English Methodism rejected. English Methodism organized a valid presbyterian Church, being, as an already isolated independent. body, guilty therein of no schism, but liable to the felt defect of ignoring Wesley's act. Dr. Porter, in his "Compendium of Methodism," furnishes ingenious suggestions why a body covering a narrow ground less needed a unifying episcopacy than our broad-spread communion. But Dr. Crane, in his valuable volume, noticed upon another page, points to some facts indicating that their rejection of the Wesleyan episcopacy is involving serious consequences. We have said that secession from a given Church is schismatic, unless justifiable by the law of revolution. When so justified it is upon the Church, and not upon the seceders, that rests the guilt of the schism. There have been several secessions from the Methodist Episcopal Church, in which it is not for us at present to say where the responsibility of the schism lay; but each one was, scripturally, a schism, with a responsibility somewhere. But we are in schism, and it behooves us as much as possible to diminish that schism by embracing all in the spirit of love and union. Christendom, generally, is in a state of deplorable schism, and it is with great interest that we trace the yearnings of her broken fragments after reunion. What the precise form of that final reunion will be which shall fulfill on earth the high-priestly prayer of Christ we inquire with deep ponder, but are unable to know. We are inclined to the belief that its organic form will be voluntary episcopacy; not compelled by the dogma of its necessity to the validity of a Church, but freely induced by the feeling that all other forms are less scripturally complete, and less efficient as a Church militant, as an army, for the conversion of the world. For it is the Wesleyanism of Wesley himself, that though a Church has a right to frame its own form, the best of all forms is the episcopal. ART. XII.-QUARTERLY BOOK-TABLE. Religion, Theology, and Biblical Literature. The Disruption of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1844-46, comprising a Thirty Years' History of the Two Methodisms. By EDWARD H. MYERS, D.D. With an Introduction by T. O. SUMMERS, D.D. 12mo., pp. 216. Nashville, Tenn.: A. H. Redford, Agent. Macon, Ga.: J. W. Burke & Co. 1875. THE author of this book, Dr. Myers, was long a leading Church editor, and is now an appointee of the Southern bishops as one of the commission to our next General Conference. The book, we are informed in Dr. Summers's Introduction, has the approval of some, and probably of all, of the bishops, and every effort seems to be made to give it the prestige of an authoritative manifesto, announcing to our Church the present views and demands of the Church South, but more specially assigning to the ministry and membership of the Church South the programme they are to accept in relation to the present and past. The proposal made from our delegates to the Church South, and generally approved by our side, to "let by-gones be by-gones," and to shake hands without a dubious debate over the past, is unceremoniously pronounced by Dr. S. to be "a farce." The old debate must be rehearsed. The present book, therefore, comes forth as a commencement of the contest, giving a one-sided, South-sided, history of some of the past, an argumentative indictment of our whole course, and a presentation of the repeal of our annulment of the so-called " Plan of Separation," (by which repeal we would be bound to surrender all Southern territory, and withdraw our jurisdiction to Mason & Dixon's line,) as condition to fraternization. When Dr. S. pronounces this volume “irenical," he is surely ironical. It is accusatory from end to end, and can be fully met only by an answer from our side equally accusatory. Dr. S. discards a peaceful "farce” in order to secure a quarrel. We did not propose to forget the past because we were not thankful and religiously proud over our past. Our antislavery history, in all its relations to the South, is a glorious history. And so far as our rectitude and Christian brotherhood in dealing with the Church South are concerned, we should rejoice with exceeding joy to have the case stated before and decided by the high court of ecumenical, catholic Methodism. This perpetual quarreling and re-quarreling, and re-re-quarreling the case over and over, with no umpire, and no arbitrative result, is to us a bitterness and a disgust. But let Christendom, let universal Methodism, sit to hear our case, and our soul would be in the work. But as to the "irenic " character of the book, it is sufficient to say that it demands as condition to fraternity action on our part which our General Conference declared, in its first movement for sending a fraternal delegation, that it would never perform, namely, withdrawal of our jurisdiction from the Southern States. Dr. Summers, we are glad to say, agrees, however inconsistently, that neither side need be required to renounce its own views and adopt those of the other. And that was ample reason for not opening a sectional debate. Let each side silently hold its own. views in regard to the past; let equitable arrangements be made in regard to present affairs, and a permanent brotherly feeling be established for the future. We shall, therefore, briefly go over the main points of Dr. Myers's history and argument, repudiating his views and frankly stating our own, but not requiring that any southerner should adopt ours. ORIGINAL AGGRESSIONS OF THE SLAVE POWER. And, at start, Dr. Myers must and does make a primary assumption which would fatally vitiate his case before the high court we invoke. Primordially, if slavery was right, Dr. Myers's side was right; if wrong, wrong. He assumes that slavery, with its oligarchy, had a right to exist and push its persistent aggressions upon freedom and right, and that its opponents who resisted its aggressions were "northern agitators," in a bad sense "abolitionists," guilty of all wickedness. We maintain that slavery had no right to exist; that whether legalized or not, it was a sin and a crime; that the laws that established it were criminal laws; that the "politics" under which it was sheltered were criminal and sinful "politics;" that those in the North who yielded to or aided its aggressions were partakers in the sin; and "the northern agitators" and "abolitionists" were "in the general" heroic maintainers of truth, freedom, and eternal justice. And now before said high court we arraign both Dr. Myers and his clients, and say that their whole history is a history of aggression; of aggression by slavery and wrong upon freedom and right, pushing back the antislavery legislation of our common Church step by step; sadly yielded to by us for a while, and when at last we took our stand at the episcopacy, and decided that slavery shall not capture it, his clients made a revolutionary disruption of the Church and established a new one. We, finding the disruption irresistible, adopted a plan by which, after they had made the disruption, peace might be sectionally maintained. That plan his clients first claimed, most untruly, to be an authorization of their disruption, and then themselves ruthlessly broke, violated, and trampled upon that very plan. We carefully observed the plan while it lasted and then legally repealed it. We are now most absurdly called upon to rescind that repeal. Never! The original platform of our American Methodism was pure and absolute abolitionism. John Wesley, in that immortal manifesto which has been a pillar of fire to our northern antislaveryism in its last forty years' fight, proclaimed the true doctrine of ultra-abolitionism. It was adopted by our founder bishops, Coke and Asbury; it was adopted by our Conference. But the despotic slaveholding oligarchy, by mobs, menaces, and pressures, silenced our bishops, and drove our Churchly legislation back until scarce a shred remained. We sorrowfully concede to Dr. Myers that our "fathers erred; " erred in servilely yielding to the aggressions of the slave power; but their error is palliated by the wonderful versatility of alternate violence, persuasion, and treachery on the part of that black aggressive power. The bottom of northern servility was touched when, in the General Conference of 1840, that humble apology for slavery was issued in reply to the antislavery address from the British Conference, quoted with such self-complacency by Dr. M. as a northern ratification of his own pro-slavery positions. We assure Dr. Myers that we have no more respect for pro-slaveryism in the North than in the South. Like any other iniquity, intemperance, for instance, it has little reference to latitude or locality. South and North, in different degrees, had share in the guilt; and South and North, in different degrees, have suffered the chastisement of the Almighty. DEALING WITH BISHOP ANDREW IN 1844. In the General Conference of 1844, after every other concession had been made to slavery, the final question came up to be tried and settled, Shall the triumph of the slave power be completed by its possessing our episcopate? The opposite forces of freedom and despotism in the two national sections were increasing in power, and it was an inevitable issue sooner or later. With freedom and the North it was a settled determination that no slaveholder's ordaining hands could be laid upon the heads of our young ministry. In the South, under the intensifying absolutism of the slave power, a discontent was growing at the hitherto agreed exclusion of slaveholders from the episcopate. The case of Bishop Andrew, who had become a slaveholder by marriage, brought the issue to a point. After a brief period of humility and willingness to resign on his part, it was boldly announced that he would not be allowed by his brethren to resign; and it is clear that the unanimous purpose was by the southern delegates adopted that there should be an episcopal slaveholder or a secession. If the northern delegates yielded, slavery was supreme in the Church; if they firmly resisted, then, on some pretext or other, which their desperate wits could invent according to the exigency, the southern section would secede. If the course of the northern delegates in their refusal should be violent or illegal, the pretext would be easy. The course of the northern majority was, however, marked by a defeating wisdom and moderation. They might have justly tried and condemned Andrew for "improper conduct," and direful then would have been the southern howl. But human ingenuity can devise no measure more mild yet efficient to preserve the purity of the episcopacy than the action adopted. His case was brought forward in routine by the Committee on the Episcopacy. The Conference then asked the bishop to furnish his statement of the facts, and that statement it accepted as the whole unquestioned case. It brought against him no charge, passed upon him no penalty, or even censure, but informed him by resolution that it was the "sense" of the General Conference that he withhold the further exercise of his episcopal functions until he had disembarrassed himself of all entanglement with slavery which would render him unacceptable in some sections of the Church. It was further directed that his name should be |