is indispensable to order and subordination, the actual, executive power is compressed into one responsible agent. This is always the case in the army, and navy; in all vessels that navigate the ocean, and in schools, academies, and colleges.

Do not ask us what all these examples have to do with church government? We are arguing the truth of a great principle, from a series of cognate facts, all going to show, that where prompt execution is necessary, it can only be secured by our favorite notion of concentrated power. And we claim the benefit of it, on the ground, that the maintain ance of a pure and scriptural morality in the church of God is a case, where the application of direct and inefficient disciplinary execution is demauded by the nature of the interest to be protected. Church government has nothing to do with life, liberty, or civil relations. It is charged only with moral rectitude and consistent scriptural godliness; and these are to be determined by the express laws of God, and their obvious spiritual principles; neither of which can be safely trusted to any other than a strictly administrative policy. A system of church polity that relies on the force of moral suasion, is defective in this; that it employs its remedial influence in a direction where it is scarcely needed, and loses it in that in which remedial discipline is indispensable. There are, in all Christian churches, those who fulfil their Christian duties up to the measure of its sacred schedule and their common ability. These all serve God from a settled and sanctified principle; and would do so, if there were no formal discipline in the church. These beautifully verify the apostle's declaration; "knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient." Upon such, this rule of moral suasion is not hurtful, but uncalled for. Upon the faulty, the lawless, and disobedient, it is wholly thrown away. Measures of more fearful legal force must be brought right down upon all church members, where religious principle is weak and defective. To wait on them without putting their membership upon the issue of, at least, a legal fitness, is a ruinous kindness to all such, perverts the church into a re

ligious hospital, instead of making it a spiritual asylum, under the most uncompromising police laws. And you make what God intended to be a tree of life, a seductive Upas. The pool of Bethesda, where the diseased were to be made whole, becomes a Dead sea, where nothing lovely grows or lives. The living, spiritual church of the Lord Jesus Christ is the salt of the earth; and woe be the dispensers of it, if, for want of careful keeping, its savor is lost. Plausible, as this celebrated spirit of leniency and indulgence may seem to be, the use of it is a perversion of the church. It practically says to every one, who is recognised as a church member, that it is the business of the church to take care of each member. But this is obliged to be an erroneous idea. The church cannot do it. and therefore the church is not so charged. Every individual member is charged with his own duty, and the church with seeing that no one walks disorderly. The duty of the church is to take care of the church as of a divine institution.

We come next to inquire into the illustrated benefit of concentrated power in the church of God, as has been tested, first in the hands of Mr. Wesley, and since, in the hands of the Episcopacy in the Methodist Episcopal church in the United States of America; in the effective, aggressive movements of Methodist Itinerancy. The submission of Mr. Wesley's first helpers in the great spiritual reform in which he was engaged, was a natural incident. He stood in the relation of a moderu apostle to all his people. They had entire confidence in his disinterested and godly judgment. The favorable results of the system worked out its justification, and led him and his noble co-laborers to adopt it, under the high sanction of providential approval. And when it became part of the legal frame-work of Wesleyan Methodism, it was not by his assumption of power, but by the sweet and harmonious choice of a body of preachers, whose hearts and feelings were so completely absorbed in the will of God, as to destroy in them all self-accommodating plans. Whatever method would carry the gospel to the greatest number of hearers, and by consequence bring the greatest number of sinners to Christ, was the plan to

be preferred. The itinerant system soon worked out the prob lem, to the utmost conviction of its friends, and to the confusion of its enemies. Its friends nobly adopted it, and made it a frontispiece in the economical rules of Methodism. Its enemies arrayed against it, on one hand, the charge of an ungraceful irregularity, and on the other, the charge of a priestly monopoly. But with all this venerable opposition, and popular persecution, Methodism, the youngest of the family of evangelical denominations, the last in the field for the world's conversion, is at this day, the first in numerical strength. A vessel, whose built was denounced as wrongly constructed for the navigation of the spiritual ocean, has been for more than a century through storms of every wind, and has never needed to be overhauled, and this day, spreads more untorn canvass than any of her elder rivals. To say the least of it, it would be a moral enigma, that a system of preaching, containing so little apostolic material, as many hold to be in our itinerant system, should be so apostolic in success.

A strictly itinerant system of preaching the gospel cannot be carried on without the concentration of powers for which we contend. Whether it be in one, or in several, it must be absolute and without appeal, in so far as the immediate obligation of compliance goes. Release from the obligation to obey the controlling power, (with us the appointing power,) must come in legitimately at another time and in another way. In our itinerant economy, this release from an unmurmuring acquiescence in the judgment of the appointing power, is secured to us, in the annual right to leave the itinerant and unite with the local order of our ministers with undiminished lustre of character. But so long as we voluntarily stand on the list of itinerant preachers, we ask an appointment in our great itinerant field, wherever the bishop may judge best, and stand for it, without the right or the desire of appeal from his godly judgment. Our simple axiomatic principle is, that in all efficient machinery, whether it refer to machinery in its proper or in its figurative sense, there must be power enough

to insure the result proposed to be effected by it; or else it will be a failure, or at best, a crippled performance.

In the organization of the M. E. Church, in the United States, in 1784, the Episcopal form of church government was adopted. But it was episcopal with many modifications and wide variations from episcopacy, as it had generally been known in the European states. But Bishop Asbury and his coadjutors were invested with the power to assign to every itinerant preacher his field of labor, for the next ensuing year. But let it be always remembered, that Bishop Asbury did not usurp this prerogative; neither did he exercise it by Mr. Wesley's appointment. He was chosen to it by a convention of the preachers over whom he was to exercise this episcopal function; chosen in fact for this very work. And after this call by the free and voluntary suffrage of his brethren, he was consecrated to the work of his office, by Bishop Coke. This right to appoint the preachers to the work judged best for them, and the requisite amount of direct power to give certainty to the system, (and these without the legal right to resist on the part of the preachers,) were given the bishops at first, and have been continued ever since; and we hope will be evermore. Now if any man can prove that the body of itinerant preachers, who are most directly concerned in and affected by this economy, have not the right to invest their bishops with this quantum sufficit of power, for the harmonious carrying out of this our favorite system, and that our bishops, when called by us, cannot exercise it over us, without lordliness, then we must turn again to our primer, and study the rights of ecclesiastics, by the dim tapers of political demagogues, rather than the heavenly charter granted and ordained by Christ.

The general commission given by Christ to his disciples was, "go ye into all the world," but the special one was, "and preach the gospel to every creature." We judge, therefore, the full design of Christ, in the institution of the gospel ministry, cannot be as certainly carried out by a settled, as it

can be by an itinerant ministry. The gospel may, in the popular acceptation of the term, be carried into all the world by a settled ministry. But we boldly question, and capitally doubt, whether the gospel ever will be preached by a settled ministry, to every creature. We therefore take the high, unembarrassed ground, that an itinerant system of preaching the gospel combines in it better elements for the fulfilment of Christ's command than can be found in any mode of church organization, where a called and settled ministry forms anything like a constitutional law. Our constitutional peculiarity is seen in our itinerancy, as itinerant preaching constitutes the burden of the rules and regulations contained in our book of discipline. Those that relate to the membership are all declared to be predicated of God's word; a fact open to the ascertainment of every member; which, if it be not true, is sufficient to keep people of good sense out of our church; and, if true, to justify a discipline as vigorous as the style we approve. And in as far as our discipline claims pecuniary aid of the members for the ministers, it leaves the bestowment of it entirely optional. But with all this mildness in the law of finance, in reference to our members, there is no relaxation in the law of labor required at our hands. So that if a preacher should neglect his work, on the most heartless field of labor ever occupied by an itinerant, the very member who had done least for his pastor, could be his accuser before any tribunal having jurisdiction, and have the law applied. These remarks are rather incidental to the subject, but they are palpable facts, and show the falsity of all the murmurings that have ever been put forth against the itinerant ministry for their exclusive power in the legislative assembly of the church. Their unmixed exercise of power in the control of the church down to this day, shows the value of concentrated power in pure hands, and proves, most clearly, that power in governmental measures, while unabused, is the one thing needful for effective discipline.

Much must, and will be said, by all candid minds, both in justification and commendation of our itinerancy. Its achieve