What those suggestions were is not recorded, but, in conjunction with memorials to the Conference, they were referred to a committee which met in February, 1852. One could not but regret that a committee of the like kind had not been appointed by the preceding Conference at the earnest entreaty of such men as John Scott, W. M. Bunting, G. B. Macdonald, and W. Arthur. It would have saved thousands of members, and a vast amount of irritation and bad blood.

The Conference of 1851, also, I attended. Dr. Hannah was the President. The delegates once more solicited the opening of some communication with the Conference in order to effect a healing of the breach. Dr. Beaumont pleaded in its favour with a subdued and tender but intense persuasiveness, in strong contrast with his usual and almost inevitable impetuosity, but quite without avail. But five out of five hundred voted in its favour. It has ever since been to me a cause of devoutest gratitude that I was one of that five. I voted out of regard to the seemly, venerable precedent of 1795, and to the sacred, binding relationship which had so lately existed between the members of the two assemblies.

The act which followed the easy counting of our little vote was, one would hope, unexampled in any free fraternal convocation. The President rose up and said: "Will the brethren who have voted for this stand up, that we may see who they are?"

At a subsequent session Mr. Steward solemnly protested against such a violent attempt to intimidate and abash the freedom of voting, which it was part of the President's most solemn duties to protect. This certainly appeared a unique contrivance for refuting the wicked slanders about the repression of freedom of speaking and voting in the Conference. The representative of a District, when we broke up, said to me: "I know at least two hundred men then sitting in the Conference who think as you do on the question." To the very natural question: "Why did not you vote as I voted?" he replied: "I daren't"; to which I answered, "I dared not but vote."

It was to this, however, that I owed the beginning of my long, close friendship with William Morley Punshon. He introduced himself to me upon the strength of it, and expressed his strong disapprobation of this attempt of the Chair itself to interfere with the freedom and honesty of voting in the Conference. By far the ablest and most popular of the young men

that year ordained, he came down from the gallery into my pew at the far back, and stamped and beat the back of his hand against the woodwork, and declared he would not be enrolled amongst a body of ministers where such an act was possible. It required all my persuasive power and that of his father and uncle, who were both present, to prevent his going away in a rage.

The fact that a perfect gentleman like the President could allow himself so far to forget both his office and himself is of no small thermometric and barometric value and significance. It shows to what a tropical degree the heat of conflict had risen, and what a portentous atmospheric pressure was weighing on the Conference.

Throughout the next three years the contest raged, but happily with an ever-decreasing decrease of members. The numerical downfall reported in the Minutes for 1852 was another 20,946; in 1853 the concessions recommended by the Ministerial Committee of the Conference and the mixed convention of ministers and laymen, and adopted by the Conference, reduced the defection to less than half that number, 10,290; in 1854 it again fell by nearly half to 6,797; and again in 1855 to 3,310. So in five years the Connexion was depleted by 100,469.

To me this devastation was, perhaps, especially distressing, as it laid waste some of the fairest and most fruitful Circuits in Methodism, on which I or my father or grandfather had looked with exultant thankfulness, and had laboured with success and shouting, bringing our sheaves with us. Many a time, on revisiting those scenes, or brooding o'er the tidings of their trampling down by the hoof of fierce fraternal conflict, have I exclaimed :

Yes,

Oh, holy mountain of my God,
How do thy towers in ruin lie?

How art thou riven and strewn abroad
Beneath the rude and wasteful sky?"

strewn abroad" as well as "riven," for the worst of it was that of the more than 100,000 lost, full 60,000 were missing, and only 40,000 found their way into the new enclosure.

CHAPTER X.

DR. BUNTING'S POLICY.

My friends overstate my case; I could state it better myself."'

"WHAT was Dr. Bunting's Policy?" It is agreed on all hands that throughout the period we are studying "Methodist politics," as Mr. T. P. Bunting most truly and intelligibly calls them, revolved around one central and colossal figure: Jabez Bunting. In his last message to the Conference, 1857, he says: "Tell the Conference I regard my policy to have been right." But what was Dr. Bunting's policy? This question has never been answered, so far as I know. In the "Life of Dr. Bunting" it is not even put, much less settled. Scattered and unconsolidated intimations and fragmentary, disjected materials for an answer may be picked up on the tide-left beach of controversial chronicle; but these disjecta membra have not been pieced together in a recognisable, a realisable, and vital unity; although he is universally admitted to have been the greatest ecclesiastical statesman that Methodism has produced. To answer this question is one of the purposes, and I trust one of the utilities, of this book. But the essential preliminary question is: "Who is to supply the answer?" Surely Dr. Bunting himself. His expostulation: "My friends overstate my case; I could state it better myself," ought certainly to be regarded. But did he ever state it himself? He did so, with his characteristic explicitness and emphasis, in his speeches in Conference and in Connexional Committees, which are rescued recently from the stuffed-out wallet of oblivion by the intuitive appreciation of Mr. Fowler. Dr. Bunting might well endorse the authenticity and value of Mr. Fowler's Conference Journal, for it is to that inestimable muniment that the public and posterity must mainly be indebted for a concrete conception of Dr. Jabez Bunting in his most historical capacity-as statesman and debater.

It must, however, in all justice to that great and good man, be first noted that he possessed in a very high degree what may be called the essential presuppositions of a leader of the people called Methodists. He could have as truly said "I live," as he sent word to the Conference, "I die in the true faith of Evangelical Arminianism. I am a true Methodist." He was, first of all, that without which no man can possibly be a truthful Wesleyan Methodist Preacher, either lay or ministerial—a firm believer in, and a faithful preacher of, the doctrines embodied in the standards by which we hold alike our office and our right to occupy a Wesleyan Methodist pulpit.

As he himself tells us, in the discussion on James Caughey, he began his ministry as a revivalist, and was such as a Localpreacher. He was built and born to be and to do the work of an evangelist. His physique and his psychology alike, his commanding presence, his manly elocution, and his mighty voice had designated him for that intensely apostolic work. Hence, notwithstanding the vast difference between him and William Bramwell in calibre and culture and their views of Methodist administration, they were true yokefellows in the work of

the Lord.

The Liverpool Minutes, his composition in 1820, is, as a manual of stable, systematic, and successful evangelism, a document which for the last seventy-seven years has been regarded as almost a part of the Constitution of Wesleyan Methodism.

But the first recorded announcement of his fundamental Church principle which I have ever met with was elicited by the debate on the Rochdale Address with regard to the proceedings on the Leeds Organ case. His speech on that occasion makes the supreme authority of the Pastorate the one essential principle of ecclesiastical polity, which, being secured, all other things were mere details and matters of expediency and easiest working.

In Dr. Bunting's view the Superintendent of the Circuit is "the Angel of the Church," and as such is responsible to God and man for the order and the purity of that portion of the household of faith, the supreme authority of the Pastorate being thoroughly secured. Again, the Circuit Stewards are the ministers of the Superintendents. What this precisely means is difficult to determine. This dictum makes the Stewards the officers of the

pastors. But the Circuit Steward, as is implied by his very designation, is a Circuit official, and his mode of induction to

office shows that he belongs alike to pastor and to people. In the corresponding office the Established Church splits the difference, regarding one churchwarden as belonging to the clergy and the other to the people. With us they both are equally related to the one and to the other.

Dr. Bunting has the great honour of originating the mixed committees of combined ministers and laymen. This was a sagacious and statesmanly stroke, and showed all the greater sagacity and statesmanship from being initiated and developed in a very tentative and cautious manner. At first the mixed committee was-I do not say was meant to be-a strong seawall against popular encroachment on pastoral prerogative. Unquestionably, Dr. Bunting was too great and good a man not to foresee or not to purposely contemplate the countless practical advantages of this arrangement. It is remarkable that the most important of all the powers and functions committed to a mixed committee of ministers and laity—that of the trial of a minister for immorality or incompetence-was the earliest, and has been the least used. The mixed District Meeting for this purpose, comprising a large lay element of stewards and others, was created in 1794 and embodied in the Plan of Pacification in 1795-97. This was five years before Jabez Bunting walked to his first Circuit (Oldham) as a probationer for the ministry. And by the year 1812 the presence of the Circuit Stewards at the annual District Meeting had become the regular and established usage. On the formation of the Missionary Society, and the appointment of a Missionary Committee in 1815, the Lay Treasurer was made a member of the General Committee, and soon afterwards "nine respectable laymen" were made members of the Committee of Finance.

This principle was gradually, and after successive intervals, extended to the other Funds; to the Schools Fund through Mr. Scott. But the representative principle was by Dr. Bunting most resolutely resisted. He contended strongly that all lay admission, even into the financial management of Connexional Funds, must be by selection on the part of the ministers; not by election on the part of the people. And the principle of natural selection was naturally brought into play. As in the lay Committees of Advice called by Presidents at critical moments, so in these statedly appointed committees, laymen were not likely to be chosen who would probably oppose the course which their selectors were most solicitous to carry. As we have seen, the

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