the most thoroughly organized ministerial training school. There are officers to prescribe the course of study and the conditions of admission to it; others to examine applicants and to decide upon their qualifications; others to have oversight of the students' studies and to see that the course is thoroughly mastered. There are not only entrance examinations, but also sessional ones at the close of every year. On completing the course the successful pupil receives not only a diploma, but also a situation with the prospect of a profitable life-long employment. What clerical seminary ever had a more perfect organization?

Here, then, we have a system of ministerial education, differing widely from the State-Church Protestant system on the one hand and from the Roman Catholic upon the other. It is unique, sui generis; it is the distinctively Methodistic system. Let us look at some of its fundamental principles.

I. It is based upon the idea that the professional instruction and training of the ministry ought to be in the hands of the Church.

In many of life's callings it matters not where or by whom recruits are trained, provided only their training is thorough. The merchant cares little where his accountants may have studied book-keeping, so they only understand it. The public concerns itself but little with the question, By whom was this lawyer or physician educated? The main question is, What is he now that his education is finished? So of most secular Vocations.

But while this is true of so many callings, it is also evident that where a social body requires the life-service of a class of men, it will be greatly to its advantage to have the control of

duty of the bishops: "To prescribe a course of study in English literature and in science, upon which those applying for admission upon trial in the Annual Conferences shall be examined and approved before sucha dmission; and also to prescribe a course of reading and study proper to be pursued by candidates for the ministry for a term of four years."-P. 95. 2. Duty of the presiding elder: "To direct the candidates who are admitted on trial to those studies which have been recommended by the bishops."-P. 95. 3. Requirement that the candidate pass the prescribed examination: "But before any such candidate is received on trial, or into full connection, or ordained deacon or elder, he shall give satisfactory evidence respecting his knowledge of those particular subjects which have been recommended to his consideration."-P. 84.

their training. A nation would be thought demented which should intrust the education of its military officers to foreign powers, however friendly. No Government is willing to intrust such high and responsible work even to its own citizens, except under direct govermental supervision, in institutions maintained by the Government. The reason is this: The highest efficiency in this branch of the public service depends not merely upon knowledge, but even more upon a certain spirit of devotion to the honor and well-being of the nation. To secure this patriotic spirit in her future defenders the country needs a direct oversight of their education, an immediate and unique relation to them. This is the philosophy, this the vindication, of special military and naval academies established and maintained by the Government in our own and other lands.

Now what we have just said of the servants of the State is yet more strikingly true of the ministers of the Christian Church. Their highest efficiency is even more dependent upon their spirit than is that of the soldier. Without complete sympathy with the Church no man can effectively perform the work of the Church. He may have the highest theological learning, the most consummate rhetorical skill, the most showy oratorical gifts, and yet without intimate and subtile sympathy with the Church, with her doctrines, her methods, her LIFE, all will not give success. This sympathy, however, can be developed only in the atmosphere of the Church, in a vital relation to her. It can be most perfectly developed only in the plastic years of a man's life. To secure, therefore, the most efficient ministry, ministerial training must be the work of the Church herself.

On this point, then, we vindicate our Methodist position, on the one hand over-against the State-Church Protestant system, which makes ministerial education the function of the State, and on the other hand, over-against the system which leaves the work to schools owned and managed by close corporations independent of ecclesiastical control. We vindicate it on grounds of reason, by appeals to the precedents of the best periods of church history, by the crucial tests of practical experience. Whatever modifications the future may bring, may it never wrest the training of our ministry from the legitimate and effective control of the Church!

IL The system adopted by our fathers proposed to train for

the ministry no man whom God had not called to the ministry. This was its second fundamental principle.

The authors of this system believed in a special divine call to the work of the ministry. They regarded the true call as coming directly from God, and as requiring the joint ratification of the man and of the Church. This Methodistic theory of the ministerial call necessarily demanded three things in a system of ministerial education. First, as it vindicated to the Church the right and duty of pronouncing upon the qualifications of the candidate both as to gifts and graces, it by a logical necessity demanded in its system of ministerial education provision for legitimate ecclesiastical control. Of this feature we have just spoken. Secondly, in making man's acceptance of God's call a free ethical act of the individual, the Methodist theory of ministerial vocation affirmed the essential freedom of the human soul, and jealously guarded responsible personal agency. In logical consistency, therefore, it could but demand a system of ministerial education which should do the same. Such a theory of the call cannot, in the nature of the case, be satisfied with any system which tends to destroy, or even weaken, in the student the consciousness of personal freedom and the sense of personal responsibility. It wants, not puppets, parrots, apes, functionaries; it wants MEN. Any system, therefore, which aims to educate ministers answering to the Methodistic ideal must be broad enough to include all genuine manmaking culture, high enough to afford growing-room to even the thriftiest characters.

But, finally, this theory of the call necessarily demanded of its system of ministerial training that it restrict itself to legitimate subjects; that is, to those who have been called of God to the work of the ministry, and whose divine call has been accepted and ratified by the individual and by the Church. It could not, like the Romish theory, allow the Church to pick her own men, for this would be interfering with God's prerogative. It could not, like the State-Church Protestant theory, accept of all who might offer, for "no man taketh this honor unto himself, but he that is called of God, as was Aaron." Here again, therefore, our historic system of ministerial education is right, the Romish and State-Church Protestant wrong.

III. The system inaugurated by our fathers provided for a

happy blending of the theoretical and practical in ministerial education.

As to the practical element in the training of our fathers, no one can question its wonderful efficiency. It was superior to any thing ever furnished in any other branch of the Church. So long as the old circuit system prevailed, each preacher enjoyed a practical apprenticeship far superior to any thing which ordinary schools can possibly offer. That system perfectly met the subjective and objective conditions of a practical evangelistic training-school of the highest efficiency. The senior preacher or presiding elder was the living instructor. To the inexperienced beginner he was at the same time the living model. He taught, not so much by text-book as by familiar lecture and practical exemplification. It was "object-teaching on a grand scale. Having been through the same experiences himself, he knew when to cheer his faint-hearted and discouraged disciple-also when to take down his self-conceit. What impresses of power and of personal peculiarity these old heroes left upon the young men under their care! Scarce a preacher of that period of our Church has left a record of his life behind without grateful commemoration of his indebtedness to some presiding elder or senior associate in his earliest circuits.

Nor let any man lightly depreciate the theoretical part of the Methodist minister's education fifty years ago. At that time the works studied by our candidates were among the latest and best in the English language. Fifty years ago, in breadth of biblical and general scholarship, Adam Clarke held a preeminence over all contemporaries, British or American, such as no man has since enjoyed. He has been called by men of other communions "the most universal scholar of his age.' ." His Commentary was then to other commentaries far more than Lange's or "The Speaker's " is to-day. What theology was being taught fifty years ago in Andover and Bangor and Princeton we now know from the published works of their respective professors. With all respect for those professors we may unhesitatingly assert that Watson's Institutes presented an abler body of divinity than they. Fletcher was at that date more invigorating, more a writer for the times, than Bushnell is to-day. The questions so masterfully handled in his "Checks" were then as much the living issues of the day as Darwinism

and Positivism are at the present time. Döllinger, the leader of the grand movement now in progress among the German Catholics against the decree of papal infallibility, in his work entitled, "Kirche und Kirchen,"* asserts that the writings of Fletcher, of Madeley, are in some respects the most important which the English theological literature of their period can show. These writings were only a part of the doctrinal text-books of our Methodist fathers. Wesley's Sermons, which they also studied so thoroughly, had at that time a freshness and vitality, and even novelty, which neither Beecher's nor Robertson's will possess the same number of years after the death of their authors. His other writings had the strength and charm, not only of unusual spiritual insight, but also of freshest and broadest scholarship. He was the first man to lift Protestant English theology out of its provincialism, and to give it its present cosmopolitan breadth of vision. He studied every literature of Christendom and inspired others to do the same. In the love for German literature he was the great pioneer of his nation. The wonderful interest now felt in this study among all Englishspeaking populations is primarily due, not to Coleridge, not to Carlyle, but to John Wesley. This is the testimony of unprejudiced investigators. In his work on Pantheism, John Hunt remarks that Wesley was the first English divine to introduce German theology into England. Others have remarked the same fact. Indeed, it is doubtful whether, with all the increased facilities, the Church of England has to-day a man more thoroughly familiar with contemporaneous thought and literature in all parts of Christendom than was in his day that loyal son of hers whose name she has so long cast out as evil. Wesley, Fletcher, Clarke, and Watson constituted a theological faculty of which any university in the world might justly have been proud. Fifty or sixty years ago, therefore, in all his prescribed studies the candidate for our ministry was brought in contact with the latest biblical science, the best principles of interpretation, the most vital questions of contemporary doctrine, and the most undeniable masters of pulpit power. So far as denominational text-books for biblical, theological, and

*"Das Bedeutendste, was die damalige theologische Literatur England's aufmıweisen hat."

"Essay on Pantheism," p. 309.