Having thus pointed out the excellences of the Catholic system, and set them off by contrast with the palpable shortcomings of the method pursued in the Protestant State Churches, it is now time to turn the tables, and set forth the good features of the State Church style of clerical training, as contrasted with that existing among the Catholics. And here we remark, in the first place, that the tendency of the State Church Protestunt system is to develop self-reliant m n, the tendency of the Papal system, on the contrary, is to produce mere functionaries. The liberty enjoyed by the student at a Protestant university in Europe is of course liable to abuse; but where it is not abused it is unquestionably favorable to the development of manly character. The student is made to think, and to think on his own responsibility. He makes the thousand mistakes to which an immature judgment is liable, but by these very mistakes his judgment is developed and matured. Conscious of his liberty, he is also necessarily conscious of his responsibility. Conscious of his responsibility, he is stimulated to make the most of himself. If a sober and thoughtful youth, he is almost certain to acquire a correctness of judgment and a strength of character invaluable in a man destined to occupy the responsible post of a public religious teacher. In the Catholic system all the tendencies lie in the opposite direction. The little black-robed boy-priest is brought so early under the influence of his ecclesiastical superior, kept so constantly under strict ecclesiastical surveillance, restrained so jealously from every exercise of independent thought, treated so completely like a child, that he has no chance to develop that personal independence and self-reliance which constitute the backbone of all firm and manly character. Under such influences plastic natures become mere fac-similes of their spiritual preceptors, while the less yielding ones discover in hypocritical sycophaney a royal road to distinction. In the matter of producing men, therefore, the Romish system cannot compare with that in Vogue in Protestant State Churches.

But again, the State Church Protestant system confers upon the theological student a breadth of general culture to which the Romish priesthood, educated in the diocesan seminaries, can lay no claim.

The course of instruction originally prescribed by the CounFOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXIV. - 7

cil of Trent for the clerical seminary embraced only the following branches: "Grammar, Singing, the Church Calendar, and other good arts; furthermore, the Holy Scriptures, the Ecclesiastical Books, the Homilies of the Saints, Casuistical Theology, and Liturgies." Whatever the term other "good arts" may have signified in the Tridentinum, it is clear, from the history of the institution, that the bishops have never regarded it as including all the studies which Protestants call good. The standard of scholarship in these schools has of course varied at different times and in different places; but at no time, and in no place, have they conferred a broad or wellbalanced education. The cultivation of classical studies has been feeble; the natural sciences have been almost utterly ignored; with general literature, poetry, art, political economy, psychology, et cetera, the student has gained no acquaintance. Whatever proficiency he may have shown in purely professional studies, the graduate of the Catholic clerical seminary has never shown himself a scholar in the broader and truer sense of the word. In this respect, therefore, the comparison of the two systems is decidedly favorable to the State Church Protestant one. Whatever other defects it may have, this system does certainly tend to produce men of broad and liberal culture. The very atmosphere of a European university is in this respect education. The free association enjoyed with. learned professors of every conceivable science, the enthusiasm of numbers, the excitement of competition, the contacts of kindred and unkindred mind, the rivalries of professions, the discussions of public questions-all these and a thousand other nameless influences are constantly stimulating the young man, prompting to broadest acquisition, developing fullest power. The result is, the Protestant clergy have always possessed a general culture broader, more thorough and scientific, than the Roman Catholic.

Finally, we may safely assert, that the specifically theological education conferred in the Protestant university is superior to that conferred in the Catholic clerical seminary.

It is granted that the theological education conferred at Oxford and Cambridge is exceedingly defective; but take the British, German, Dutch, and Scandinavian universities as a class, and no contradiction on this head need be feared, even

from a candid and intelligent Catholic. The Romanists have profoundly learned theologians, but as a rule they do not come from the clerical seminary, but from the Catholic university. Even with these they are behind the Protestant State Churches in accuracy, comprehensiveness, and depth of theological scholarship. In all profounder questions of sacred philology, criticism, geography, ethnology, history, one must go to Protestant authors for the latest, deepest, and most philosophic researches. Catholic writers themselves have often tacitly acknowledged this. The explanation is simple. The Catholic seminary professor has been isolated from contact with the scientific world -confined to the drudgery of manufacturing a race of human automatons for the use of the Holy Catholic Church. The Protestant university professor, on the contrary, has been for generations in closest identification with the great centers where science is cultivated and thought evolved. The one has had the temptations of an easy and assured settlement, the other the stimulus of competition and good fellowship. The one has been confined to the defense of an infallibly corrupt Church, the other has been free to follow his instinctive love of truth. The one is the devotee of an institution, the other lives for his science. The result is, the one produces good mass-celebrators, the other thorough theological scholars.

These, then, are the respective excellences and defects of those educational systems which have grown up out of the Roman Catholic and State Church Protestant theories of the ministerial call. It remains to set forth in another paper the distinctively Methodistic system, and to consider the question of its adaptation to the present circumstances and wants of our Church.

ART. VI.-THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH IN THE SOUTHERN STATES.

METHODISM, in its primitive form, in America, had many societies organized within the present limits of the Southern States prior to the Revolutionary War. Immediately after its organization as an Episcopal Church, in 1784, societies were rapidly multiplied throughout the South, and several annual

Conferences were held there before the year 1790. From this date, for fifty-five years the Methodist Episcopal Church exercised unquestioned jurisdiction within all the States and Territories of the nation.

The year 1845 inaugurated a new epoch. A revolution had been precipitated upon the Church, which resulted in the organization of a new denomination, which assumed jurisdiction over nearly all the Methodist societies within the limits of the Southern States. Thereafter, the Methodist Episcopal Church was supposed to be bounded on the south by an imaginary line somewhere adjacent to "Mason and Dixon's line."

No adjustment of boundaries has ever been made between the rival organizations. An attempt to do it was unsuccessful. It has not been renewed since 1848. For more than twentyfive years the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, have occupied, in common, such portions of the United States as their inclinations and opportunities allowed. The expansion of the first-named Church southward was very slow, however, until after the extirpation of slavery and the close of the civil war.

These events made freemen of millions of slaves, and also made poor men of multitudes who had been rich slaveholders. The Southern Churches generally, and most of all the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, suffered sadly from the exhaustion and impoverishment which followed the devastations of war; so that the support of their most important Churches was as much as they could at once provide for. Many of their Churches were unsupplied, and others were wholly broken up and scattered. Besides, their missionary treasury was burdened with a heavy debt, and missionary work, even to the extent to which that had been sustained before the war, was now impossible. And that work had suddenly expanded to proportions of immense magnitude.

A nation had been born in a day, whose pressing necessities, intellectual and spiritual, could only be supplied by an immediate outlay of millions of money, and the earnest labors of thousands of devoted men and women as preachers and teachers. A million of children clamored for the knowledge of letters. An equal number of adults begged for the privilege of learning to read God's word.

The money needed to provide school-houses, and support teachers for the freedmen, to supply pastors for destitute flocks, to build houses of worship for the poor, the South did not have. The work to be done was despised and rejected by the Southern people generally. Public sentiment fiercely antagonized it. The Freedmen's Bureau was hated without a cause, and was made "a hissing and a curse." Indigent women of the South, competent and anxious to teach, were prevented from doing so because threatened with social ostracism if they dared to teach negro children or take “Yankee pay." Thus a necessity for intervention was created by the Southern people themselves. It was promptly and amply met by the Government and the Churches of the North.

The national treasury was opened. Various denominations domiciled at the North contributed large sums of money. Hundreds of teachers and scores of ministers went South as missionaries. Small pay, hard work, constant privation, social ostracism, and frequent exposure to deadly peril, tested their sincerity and heroism, and also guaranteed their success. Among those laborers were found more members of the Methodist Church than of any other. This surely was not a fault. Nor is it claimed to be meritorious. It was rather a partial index of the greater obligation of so large a body of Christians.

The school-house, the Sunday-school, the Church, are all closely related every-where. In the South there was an immediate outgrowth from the first to the second and the third. A demand was realized in many new places for houses of worship. The wants of freedmen were greater than was the supply before furnished to slaves. The cabin worship of plantation hands. was not suited to the case of "American citizens of African descent." The former sufficed when attendance on worship, and even membership in the Church, was dependent on the will of a master. But when all were at liberty to go who chose to attend, there was not room enough to contain them.

Providentially, the missionary treasury of the Methodist Episcopal Church had a surplus of funds on hand. Seventy thousand dollars were appropriated to the Southern mission field, for the purpose of building churches. Many small honses were erected, at a cost of only a few hundred dollars each. Subsequently the Church Extension Society carried for