EBENEZER 
 
 nmm on metDoaism 
 
 ITS aONinCANCE AND 
 ITS HISTORY Jt^JtJtJ^Ji 
 
 Iklivered at the Closing Service of the 
 
 Methodist Church, Coboarg, Jaty 8th, 
 
 i900, by the ^e*v. A, H, ^eynar. 
 
 'm 
 

H£cc\C 
 
 EBENEZER 
 
 e^ 
 
 
 a'"- 
 
 Address on Methodism : Its Significance and its History, 
 delivered at the closing service of the Methodist 
 Church, Cobourg.^J^ly 8th, 1900, by the 
 Rev. A^ Hf Reynar. 
 
 TORONTO: 
 
 1900. 
 
EBENEZER. 
 
 TT7 HE particular occasion of our meeting this evening — the 
 * I last service in our old church, cannot be considered a 
 joyful one in the common sense of the word, for there 
 are many pensive and some sad memories suggested by it. 
 Neither do we consider it a sad occasion, for it brings to mind 
 the causes of thanksgi\'ing for the past and grounds of hope for 
 the future. But it is an exceedingly interesting occasion. It 
 is a time when we raise our Ebenezer, when we thank God for 
 all the way in which He has led us and take courage to move 
 forward at His command. 
 
 The duty laid upon me to-night is that of giving you a 
 retrospect of the work of God connected with this church, in 
 which we now meet for the last time. And as the retrospect 
 is a long one, I enter upon it without further introduction. I 
 give it in three parts : (I.) The rise of Methodism and its true 
 significance; (H.) The introduction of Methodism into this 
 country; and (HI.) The growth of Methodism in this church. 
 
 I. 
 
 The religious movement called Methodism was not a new 
 doctrinal system, the doctrines taught by the Methodists being 
 those generally taught in the Church of England.* And it 
 was not a new ecclesiastical organization and discipline. 
 Neither was it a new form of worship. But it was a new spirit 
 — a spirit that took the religion of the gospel seriously, and 
 
 * Of course this refers to the time of John Wesley. Much that is now taught in 
 Anglican churches would have astonished the churchmen of John Wesley's day. 
 
that insisted upon a personal experience of the things prepared 
 for us in the Christian dispensation — more particularly of a 
 heartfelt repentance toward God and a sincere faith toward our 
 Lord Jesus Christ, a faith that brings a conscious peace with 
 God, and that works in love to all mankind. Such, and such 
 only, was the original spirit and aim of Methodism. But it was 
 a despised thing at that time by most of the great and privi- 
 leged, despised and persecuted by many of those who should 
 have been the first to welcome and help it. This is all changed 
 now, and the great modern historians of the English people 
 recognize it as one of the most important movements of 
 history, and one to which the English people owe much of the 
 greatness to which they have risen in modern times. But this 
 movement, which was originally nothing but a new awakening 
 to moral earnestness and purpose, was forced in self-defence to 
 create a new organization, to adopt new forms of worship, and 
 to determine within certain broad limits its doctrinal state- 
 ments and standards. The new wine would have been spilled 
 and lost if it had not been put into new bottles. 
 
 It was with extreme reluctance that the great leader of the 
 new movement took the steps necessary to the organization of 
 the separate ecclesiastical body, but that reluctance was equalled 
 by the unflinching courage with which he took those steps, 
 whenever it became clear to him that the change was necessary 
 to preserve and extend the original spirit of Methodism, and 
 carry on its work. He never separated from the Church of 
 England, but he over-stepped the discipline of that Church in 
 a way no churchman can forgive. He rejected the doctrine 
 of Apostolical Succession, saying, " I could never see it proved 
 and I am persuaded I never shall." (Works, HI. 454, XHI. 
 251.) But to a churchman of the strictest sect to-day the 
 Apostolical Succession is essential to the very being of a Church. 
 Again, Wesley denied that there were three orders of the 
 clergy, and said, " Bishops and Presbyters are essentially one 
 order." (H. 64, XHI. 253.) He went further and exercised 
 the powers of a bishop in the ordination of some of his 
 preachers, especially for the Church in the United States, 
 immediately after they had secured their independence. And 
 
this he did rather than seek ordination for them at the hands 
 of the EngHsh bishops. In justification of his action he says : 
 " As our American brethren are now totally disengaged from 
 the state and from the English hierarchy, we dare not entangle 
 them again either with the one or the other. They are now at 
 full liberty to follow the Scriptures and the Primitive Church. 
 And we judge it best that they should stand fast in the liberty 
 wherewith God has so strangely made them free." (XIII. 252.) 
 
 The Methodists of to-day use the very same language as 
 did John Wesley. They would not be unwilling to take their 
 place in a national church as churchmen after the school of 
 John Wesley, but not after the school of some who teach what 
 they are pleased to call Church principles — principles that 
 John Wesley repudiates as contrary to the Scriptures and the 
 Primitive Church. 
 
 When urged to organize the Methodists in England in a 
 similar way, Wesley hesitated, not because of any sacerdotal 
 scruples, but because of his respect for a National Church 
 established by the law of the land. (XIII. 256-7.) He be- 
 lieved that it was still lawful to continue in the Church, but 
 he confessed that he could not answer the arguments in favor 
 of a separate and independent organization, and that his con- 
 clusion that it was lawful to remain in the Church stood " al- 
 most without any premises " to bear its weight. " That I have 
 not gone too far yet I know, but whether I have gone far 
 enough I am extremely doubtful." (XIII. 208.) To the end 
 of his life he kept this position with these misgivings, but in 
 his famous legal document the Deed of Declaration, enrolled 
 in chancery, he provided for the untramm.elled freedom of the 
 Methodists after his death in order, as his own words say, " to 
 fix them upon such a foundation as is likely to stand as long 
 as the sun and moon endure." (XIII. 250.) 
 
 I will not say that the division which then took place is 
 without some disadvantages. It would have been to our 
 mortal thinking more happy if the Church of England had 
 known the day of her visitation, and kept within her own fold 
 the millions of the English people in the old land, and in the 
 greater BriUin of modern time3. Had they done so, the Church 
 
6 
 
 of England and the Church of the English people would be 
 one and the same. I cannot but regret that such is not the 
 case. As the English race has by stubbornness and mis- 
 management been so divided that the English in the United 
 States outnumber the English in Great Britain and Ireland, so 
 has a similar ecclesiastical mismanagement resulted in the fact 
 that the Church of England is no longer the Church of the 
 English, for there are now more Methodists in English-speak- 
 ing lands than there are members of the Church of England. 
 I will not say that this state of things is without some great 
 disadvantages, but I will say that it is much better for the 
 whole world that the new spirit was provided with a new body 
 in which to live and grow, than that it should have been over- 
 borne and lost in the sluggishness and earthliness of the 
 National Church as it was in those days. So it was with the 
 great reformation of the sixteenth century. The division of 
 western Christendom into papal and anti-papal parties is not 
 altogether happy, but it is far happier and better even for the 
 Church of Rome than would have been a result like that of 
 the Wycliffe Reformation and that of the Bohemian Reforma- 
 tion, which were strangled in the bosom of the Church. 
 
 In our times there is some feeling after a reunion of the 
 churches — Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian and others. 
 We rejoice in this feeling of brotherly love, and we are 
 sure that the Methodists will be the first to welcome such 
 reunion whenever it can be had without sacrifice of the 
 truth and freedom with which God has blessed them. When 
 the supreme importance of a personal experience of the things 
 of God is assured, and a direct relation of the soul to God, 
 apart from all priestly intrusion, then and then only can we be 
 yoked together again with those from whom we have been 
 separated. There are some good people, and even learned 
 people, who honestly think that sacerdotalism, is of the essence 
 of Christianity, but there are many others just as godly, just 
 as disinterested, and just as learned who honestly hold that 
 sacerdotalism is no part whatever of the religion of Jesus 
 Christ and His apostles, but rather a survival and intrusion of 
 Judaism and heathenism. In the old time there were many 
 
learned and godly men, counsellors and kings, bishops and 
 popes, as well as millions of humbler folk, who honestly 
 believed in alchemy and astrology, and the divine right of 
 kings, who believed that the earth was a plane and the centre of 
 the solar system and of the universe. So now there are those 
 who still believe in sacerdotalism and the divine right of 
 bishops, and yet they are, many of them, learned and godly 
 men, and men entitled to our respect and love, not, however, 
 for their false opinions, but for their true moral and spiritual 
 worth, and for the love of God and man that transpires in 
 their daily lives. 
 
 II. 
 
 The second part of our retrospect deals with the introduction 
 of this new movement into the new world — the coming of 
 Methodism to America and Canada. 
 
 New intellectual or moral and spiritual movements often 
 follow the great courses of conquest, colonization and com- 
 merce. In the first century Roman soldiers and traders 
 brought Christianity to Britain. In the sixteenth century the 
 new learning and the reformation spread in the same way 
 through Germany, Italy and Spain, the Netherlands, France 
 and England, and in the eighteenth century it was once again 
 soldiers and traders and colonists who carried Methodism 
 across the seas to America, and to the greater Britain in every 
 quarter of the globe. 
 
 The story may be familiar to many of you, but it may be 
 briefly repeated for the benefit of the younger people. 
 
 In 1758 Wesley found in Ireland some German communities 
 who had been driven from their homes on the Rhine about fifty 
 years before that time. Amongst these people Methodism did a 
 good work in helping them from drunkenness and profanity to 
 sober, godly living. Some of these good people emigrated to 
 the new world. But without the old helps in their religious 
 life, many of thsm were backsliding into their former ways of 
 drunkenness, profanity and gambling. There was, however, a 
 good woman among them named Barbara Heck, who stirred 
 up a local preacher, named Philip Embury, to do his work as 
 
8 
 
 an evangelist and testify against the prevailing carelessness of 
 life. This he seemed ready to do, and in his own humble 
 dwelling, with a congregation of five persons, he began the 
 work that has broadened into the Methodism of the United 
 States and Canada, with its millions of adherents and its world- 
 wide activities. A Captain Webb, from the garrison at Albany, 
 converted three years before in Bristol, came tc Embury's 
 assistance. In about two years they built the first Methodist 
 place of worship in America— Wesley Chapel on John Street, 
 New York. Next year help was sent from England, and the 
 work prospered till the breaking out of the war of Independ- 
 ence. Yes, and throughout all the distractions of the war 
 from its outbreak in 1775 to its close in 1783, the work spread, 
 so that at the close of the war there were of the Methodists 
 some eighty-five preachers and fourteen thousand members. 
 
 We now come to our own country. At the close of the War 
 of Independence, many of the colonists who had supported the 
 motherland in the Revolutionary War, determined to find new 
 homes for themselves under the old flag in the north land of 
 Canada. Then began the emigration or, to use a newly 
 adopted word, the great trek of the U. E. Loyalists. Dis- 
 posing of their property for anything it would bring, sometimes 
 giving it away, or even abandoning it altogether, they left their 
 old homes and went, some of them, over seas to New Bruns- 
 wick and the other Maritime Provinces, and others overland, 
 often footsore and famished, to the banks of the St. Lawrence 
 and shores of the great lakes. Naturally they selected lands 
 as near as possible to the sparse settlements in the country at 
 that time. Those settlements were along the lines of water 
 communication by river and lake used by the settlers, and 
 before them by the old Canadian voyageurs, and in sti'l earlier 
 times by the native Indians. The great course was up the St. 
 Lawrence and along the Bay of Quinte. Others took another 
 course by the Niagara and the shores of Lake Erie, and up the 
 Grand River. These Loyalist emigrants were well received, as 
 was only just, by the Government of Canada. A free grant of 
 two hundred acres was given to each of their children. In thig 
 way justice w^ ^one ^nd th^ b^?t ?^ttl§r§ segur^d for Canada, 
 
9 
 
 With this people came many Methodists, and amongst them 
 the Hecks and some of the Emburys, who had made the first 
 efforts to establish Methodism in New York. These good 
 people continued their good work in Canada till their loyal 
 dust was laid to rest in the quiet churchyards on the banks of 
 the St Lawrence. 
 
 Once again in this country it was by soldiers that the first 
 conquests for Methodism were attempted and achieved. A 
 local pree^cher named Tuffy, of the 44th regiment, was the first 
 to begin in the Province and City of Quebec in 1780, and a 
 Major Neal, another Irish Methodist, was the first in Ontario, 
 at Niagara, 1786. 
 
 In 1788 Lyons, a school teacher at Adolphustown, on the 
 Bay of Quinte, threw himself into the work of an evangelist 
 and showed himself wise to win souls. The same year Charles 
 Justin McCarthy began in Canada the testimony by which he 
 saved others, but that led him to a martyr's death and crown. 
 
 We have now come to familiar names and familiar ground. 
 Many of us have seen the venerable form of a son of this 
 Charles Justin McCarthy on the streets of Cobourg and in this 
 very church, and most of you know something of a grand- 
 daughter of his, still living amongst us, whose many public and 
 private benefactions will be long remembered. McCarthy was 
 a Whitfield Methodist. He came over from the United States 
 to visit friends in the neighborhood of Kingston. He was a 
 man of attractive manners and speech, and his evangelistic 
 labors were made a blessing to many. But the local authori- 
 ties, who were animated by a religious bigotry and intolerance 
 — now, thank God, quite impotent if not quite dead — had him 
 arrested as a vagrant and sentenced to banishment. He is 
 supposed to have perished directly or indirectly at the hands 
 of the brutal men who were charged to transport him from this 
 country to the United States. Certain it is that from that time 
 he absolutely disappeared, and his persecutors and their agents 
 never saw fit to throw light on his fate. He may properly be 
 regarded as the proto-martyr of Methodism in Canada. 
 
 In 1790 the first Methodist itinerant preacher appeared in 
 this country. At that time the Methodists d( the United 
 
10 
 
 States were extending their work into their own northern 
 country, and one of them, Wm. Losee, received a roving com- 
 mission to go into the regions beyond, the farthest north of 
 that day, and bring the good tidings of a full and free and 
 present salvation to the distant and scattered settlements on 
 the Canadian border. Losee, a Loyalist himself, soon found 
 his way to the emigrant Loyalists on the Bay of Quinte. He 
 had great success, and organized the first Methodist circuit in 
 Canada, called the Kingston Circuit 
 
 In 1792 were built the first Methodist churches, one at Hay 
 Bay. and the other at Ernesttown. It was by an interesting 
 coincidence that the first Upper Canada Parliament was held 
 at Niagara, and the first General Conference of the Methodist 
 Episcopal Church in the United States was held in Baltimore 
 in the same year. There were in 1792 two -Methodist circuits, 
 that from Kingston west called the Cataraqui Circuit, and 
 that from Kingston east to Cornwall called the Oswegotchie 
 Circuit. 
 
 In 1795 the Methodists of the Niagara region secured a 
 missionary, and were added to the regular work of the Church. 
 This year is further noticeable in our history for the transfer of 
 the seat of the Provincial Government from Niagara to York, 
 or Toronto, as it is now called. 
 
 III. 
 
 The third chapter of our retrospect or Methodism in Cobourg 
 now comes before us. 
 
 The year 1800, or exactly one hundred years ago, saw the 
 regular beginning of Methodism in this place. Till that time 
 Cobourg, with the region a jout it, was on the western limit of 
 the Bay of Quinte Circuit, but in the minutes of 1801 it 
 appears for the first time under the name of " Bay of Quinte, 
 with Smith's Creek," and it appears later as the " Smith's Creek 
 Circuit." The creek which gives the name is that discharging 
 into Lake Ontario at Port Hope. 
 
 In 1805 Smith's Creek appears again, but now it is connected 
 with Yonge Street. An early Church historian writes : 
 
11 
 
 " Though the Yonge Street and Smith's Creek Circuits were of 
 large extent, yet the population was scanty, the preaching 
 places few and far between. A preacher might ride through a 
 township before he found the little settlement and the log-house 
 in which he was to preach, and a couple of townships before he 
 came to the next appoiutment." 
 
 The war behveen tne Mother Country and the Unit<^d States 
 in 1812-14, with all its distractions and sufferings, naturally 
 hindered to some extent the work of the Church. It is not for 
 us now to discuss the folly and wickedness of that war, but 
 however much we may have suffered in it, we cannot look back 
 upon it with shame. The young Canadians doing battle in 
 South Africa to-day are not doing more than might have been 
 expected of the grandsons of the men of 181 2-14. Canadians 
 did their duty in those days and they are only doing their duty 
 now. 
 
 The Methodist preachers and people also did their duty at 
 that time. They stood by their work and managed their own 
 affairs without help and without oversight. It is pleasing, 
 however, to see that though politica' loes, the Methodists of 
 Canada and those of the United States were at one in the 
 affairs of the Kingdom of God, and brought comfort to each 
 other in the suffering of the battlefield, and in the weary days 
 that fell to prisoners of war. 
 
 In 1824 the Methodists of Canada were formed into a 
 separate Conference. The first meeting of the Conference was 
 held in Hallowell, now Picton. Four years later, or in 1828, 
 this Canadian Conference was made independent of the Ch?. ch 
 in the United States. It was by a large majority that the 
 General Conference resolved on this action, and though it was 
 strongly opposed by some, the opponents themselves accepted 
 the decision in the best spirit. 
 
 In 1825 Cobourg was made a separate circuit, and in 1826 
 the Hamilton Conference was held. The Cobourg people of 
 this generation will feel more interest in this early Conference 
 when they know that it was not held in the City of Hamilton, 
 but in the township of Hamilton, about two miles north of 
 Cobourg, where now stands the little church at Hull's Corners. 
 
12 * 
 
 This Conference, and a camp-meeting that accompanied it, was 
 further remarkable for the conversion of the heathen Indians, 
 who were saved by scores and added to the Church. 
 
 The year 1827 saw the arrival in Cobourg of a young assist- 
 ant preacher, whose memory will live with the history of this 
 country. He was much interested in the Indian work as well 
 as in the work amongst the settlers throughout the country. 
 Many years later he wrote : " At the Conference of 1827 I was 
 appointed to the Cobourg Circuit, extending from Bowmanville 
 Village to the Trent, including Port Hope, Cobourg, Haldi- 
 mand, Colborne, Brighton, and the whole country south of 
 Rice Lake, with the townships of Seymour and Murray. On 
 this extensive and laborious Circuit I am not aware that I 
 missed a single appointment, notwithstanding my controversial 
 engagements and visits to the Indians of Rice Lake and Mud 
 Lake. I largely composed on horseback sermons and replies 
 to my ecclesiastical adversaries."* 
 
 But his work was not all done on horseback. Some of the 
 good people of Cobourg used to see his study light burning 
 on into the hours of the morning, and no doubt many of them 
 thought there was a sad waste of strength and of good tal- 
 low candles. They did not know till later that the young 
 preacher was writing those articles that completely refuted the 
 ungenerous and untruthful aspersions cast upon the Methodist 
 preachers and people by their privileged adversaries — writings 
 which led, more than anything else, to the complete attainment 
 of equal rights in this Canada of ours. I need scarcely say to 
 any one acquainted with the history of this country, that the 
 young minister was none other than Egerton Ryerson, who 
 then and to his life's end declared that it was his greatest 
 honor to be a Methodist preacher. 
 
 I shall now tell you something of the various places in which 
 the Methodists of Cobourg met to worship and to hold sweet 
 fellowship together. Though I now speak of things long gone 
 by, I speak from the testimony of living witnesses from whose 
 lips I have taken much of what I have to say. 
 
 * RyersQn'§ Story of My Life, page 8q, 
 
13 
 
 In 1823 there was a public school-house on the ground 
 immediately south of this building. It was in that place that 
 the first Methodist meetings were held. The preaching did 
 not take place every Sunday, but only as the itinerant preacher 
 came round to this part of his Circuit. A larger chapel, how- 
 ever, was at Hull's Corners, and that was the scene of the 
 quarterly meetings, to which the people came up from far and 
 near. At that early date, viz., 1823, a Sunday school was 
 already established amongst Cobourg Methodists in the school- 
 house of which I have spoken. A good man named Thaddeus 
 Osgood, a Presbyterian, I believe, went through the country 
 organizing Sunday schools in those early times, and the interest 
 in Sunday schools and the sense of their importance was so 
 great in the country that the Legislature of Upper Canada 
 made a grant of ;^I50 "for the use and encouragement of 
 Sunday schools of indigent and remote settlements," to pur- 
 chase reading "for moral and religious instruction." The 
 second place of worship was a small wooden church, on the site 
 where this church now stands. I cannot say just when it was 
 built. It was not here, a living witness tells me, in 1823 or for 
 some time after that, but another witness tells me that he 
 found it in 1830, an old wooden frame building of about thirty 
 by forty feet. Another member of this church describes it, as 
 he first saw it in 1847, ^s "an old patched and most peculiarly 
 arranged building. It had been enlarged once or twice, and 
 still being too small for the constantly increasing population 
 ... it had been decided to put a gallery across the west 
 end. But the ceiling being too low, that part of it under which 
 the gallery was to be built had been removed and a sloping 
 ceiling . . . had been made, extending from over the front 
 of the gallery ... to the rafters at the west end." 
 
 The next change was made in 1852, when this old wooden 
 building was moved east of the present site and turned so as 
 to face the north. So it stood whilst the new brick church was 
 a-building. The new church was finished and handed over by 
 the contractor, Mr. Charles Pomeroy, to the trustees on the 
 20th of July, 1853, the trustees expressing their entire satis- 
 faction with the work. 
 
14 
 
 # 
 
 Seven years later, in i860, the new church was enlarged by 
 extension to the east, providing 186 additional sittings, and by 
 the addition of a gallery in the west end and a new brick vestry. 
 Eight years pass, and in May, 1868, the organ was put in at a 
 cost of about $1350. 
 
 In 1869 the present side galleries were added and the build- 
 ing brought into the form in which you now see it. 
 
 I have in this brief account of the buildings made with 
 hands passed over some years that will be remembered by 
 thousands in Canada, and by many in other lands, when they 
 her^r of the church improvement now before us. 
 
 In 1832 the foundation of Upper Canada Academy was laid, 
 and from 1836 to 1892 this was the church home of thousands 
 of the brightest and best of the young people of our country. 
 The academic advantages in this country, being with other 
 advantages monopolized by the Church of England and refused 
 to those who would not submit to her, our Canadian people, the 
 Methodists and Presbyterians in particular, undertook to help 
 themselves in these matters, and so God helped them. Upper 
 Canada Academy was the first memorable accomplishment in 
 this good work, and it has been followed by the complete 
 removal of the abuse in opposition to which the college was 
 founded, viz., sectarian control of higher education. Upper 
 Canada Academy became later Victoria College and Univer- 
 sity. Thousands of students who spent their college years in 
 this town, look back to it in gratitude and affection ; and they 
 will wish you God-speed and pray that the new things may be 
 as good as the old, 
 
 I should not and I would not close this retrospect without a 
 word of spiritual building, and of the stones cut and shaped 
 here by the Great Architect and by his workmen for the build- 
 ing not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. It would 
 take another evening to give only a sketch of that work and to 
 recall with tender, loving interest the lively stones, the polished 
 shafts, and stately pillars of the spiritual house that have in 
 other years enriched and adorned this church. I cannot trust 
 myself to speak of them by name, but you will think of them, 
 
15 
 
 and their memory will bring you sweetness and light and 
 strength. 
 
 You will thank God for one and another with whom you 
 took sweet counsel together, as you came up to the House of 
 the Lord. But the Lord has taken them to Himself — they are 
 gone to be with Christ, which is far better. We will not 
 think of them as far away. They are with Hini^ and He is 
 " not far from any one of us." Whilst, therefore, we now go 
 back in thankful retrospect over all the way in which the Lord 
 has led us, and look forward in hope to the way before us, you 
 will not think of them as uninterested or absent though unseen, 
 
 *' Nor count me all to blame if I 
 Conjecture of a stiller guest, 
 Perchance, perchance among the rest, 
 And, though in silence, wishing joy." 
 
 Bear with me ^ moment longer in this retrospect, for there is 
 one thing that has taken place in these last days which has con- 
 tributed too much to the up-building of the Methodist Church 
 to be passed over without mention. I mean the happy con- 
 summation of the reunion of the several branches of Methodism. 
 The example of the brotherly love with which the brethren have 
 come to dwell together in unity is one of the most goodly and 
 pleasant things in the eyes of God and man. It seems most 
 fitting that the new church should be a worthy thank-offering 
 for and a memorial of the work of grace that has brought these 
 various churches together without, so far as I know, one deed 
 or word of which we should be ashamed in the presence of the 
 great Lord and Master of us all. 
 
 So much for the retrospect. My last word is of the prospect. 
 And the prospect that we all cherish is that in the new church 
 the old spirit and the old truths may continue as from the 
 beginning, the spirit of love and the truths of repentance toward 
 God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ, of being born 
 again, and of the witness of the Spirit with our spirits that 
 we are the children of God. Of course I do not mean by this 
 that we expect the Methodism of a hundred years hence to be 
 
16 
 
 in all respects the same as the Methodism of to-day, not to 
 sa/ of a hundred years ago, but we hope and expect that it 
 will be the same in spirit and life. I would despair of Meth- 
 odism if I thought that its forms and methods would not 
 change with the changing requirements and possibilities of the 
 times. That would be a sure sign of a dead Church, but 
 change and growth is the sure sign of the energies of life. 
 How beautiful soever the bud and blossom may be, they must 
 change and pass away, but how can we regret the change when 
 the bud blows into the flower and the blossom ripens into the 
 fruit ? So may this church, and the Methodist Church through- 
 out the world, grow from more to more, and hand on to the 
 coming generations as flower and fruit what the generations 
 past have bequeathed to us as bud and blossom. 
 
 Now unto Him that is able to keep us from falling and to 
 present us faultless before the presence of His glory, to the 
 wise God, our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and 
 power, both now and ever. Amen. 
 
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