amenable to them; and justice and judgment were administered by them. There was no countervailing influence for obligations imposed by suffrage. These agents were recommended by good citizens to the executives as men that would maintain law and order, and they did it. Their appointment being very direct, their connivance at public evils and neighborhood nuisances was rare. Their popular fame grew out of their ministerial fidelity and incorruptible integrity. They were placed in trust of the law for its maintainance; but, as the lust of suffrage crept on and gained friends, and the desire to vote on the choice of all officers of government, from a bailiff up to the president, became a political mania, executive power, in this respect, was restrained, and the safe character of a republican government was made an offering upon the altar of widened and indiscriminate suffrage. During the period alluded to in the palmy days of this republic, when officers of justice were appointed by the executives for the execution of law against and upon the offenders, the ends of government were secured, and, as far as law went in those days in restraint of public evils and in abatement of nuisances, it could be applied. Magistrates were appointed and maintained for the punishment of evil-doers. But, since the love of an immoderate democracy has seized upon the public mind and every officer has to be elected by a popular vote, it is a matter as clear as moral light. and demonstration can make it, that in most places where a faithful and energetic magistracy is needed, they are obtained under circumstances calculated practically to restrain and hinder the execution of law against the moral pests of city and country. A stern and vigorous maintainance of law and good order would be directly against the wishes and interests of the outlaw crowd who hold the decisive power at the ballot-box. No order of ministry, therefore, will be bold and faithful in the punishment of transgression where the office is given by popular suffrage and made dependent on the same chameleon type for a second edition. Take most of the mayors and aldermen of our cities, where drinking, gaming, Sabbath-breaking and lewdness are in good

demand, and make them elective by the people at large, and few convictions, light fines and general escape will tell the story of executive administration. Make the same officers the creation of the executive on the recommendation of citizens, and you will have a more energetic, fearless and faithful magistracy. This would arise in part from the fact that liquor venders, gamblers, Sabbath-breakers and brothel-visiters could never be heard in the executive chamber of an honest governor, appointing agents for the protection of virtue and justice. It is only under the evil genius of a wild and unwise democracy that such lepers are permitted to come into general society. Hence the popularity of a loose, unbridled government, wherever vice ought to be restrained by legal force. Any agency, as fruitful of evil as this influence is, both in church and state, is either a radical evil, or else a good so easily turned into an evil, that it will do either to shun or to fear.

Government, like everything else, where power is an indispensable element to success, must have so much concentration of it as to make the effect sure, or else all must be ultimate mockery and failure. This is true in mechanics, from a watch to a locomotive, and no less true in government than it is in machinery. And equally true, whether the government be in church or state, such a concentration of it must be secured and maintained as will insure government, or else all is unsettled and unsafe. If this necessary concentration cannot be secured where there is much division of power between parties, or where there is too much extension of formalities, these should both be shunned as a maelstroom.

Great division of power among parties, or extension of it in formalities, is dilution and neutralization of power; modifications desirable chiefly to restless, lawless and selfish subjects. The character of law, if it is sufficiently stringent to protect righteousness and deal out even-handed justice to the insubordinate, must be secured and maintained by the concentration of power in the hands of the administration. So long as the governed are well secured against the evils of either an unwise or oppressive application of law, there is no cause of

terror nor reason for rebellion, with either good citizens or quiet saints. Indeed, so far as our church is concerned, the danger is not of expulsion by oppressive and lordly inflictions of disciplinary law, but of retention in the church long after the contempt of our general rules loudly demanded expulsion, or the being laid aside for a breach of our rules, even in the absence of flagrant crimes. All law and common sense would decide at once, that a church member, living in open, heavendaring sins, ought to be expelled. But the question is, ought disorderly church members to be laid aside, because they are disorderly? And if they ought, where can the executive power necessary to the enforcement of the rules be as safely and wisely lodged, as in the hands of pastors, with a right of appeal to the church for arrest of judgment whenever the church shall honestly believe that the pastor has gone beyond the spirit of our general rules? If he has only administered the law of the church, there is no injustice done, and the investure of power is no evil in his hands, but a positive good. The intention of our general rules is not carried out, nor has it been done, since the application of their legal interests has been, by custom, removed from the administrative duty of our ministers. Nor will they ever be again enforced, until they are placed, as once they were, within the administrative scale of ministerial duties, so as to make doing or failing to do a test question in the annual conferences. And for ourself, we here declare two things: We would rather see our general rules removed from our discipline, than kept there and practically contemned by as many tolerated members as they are. And we do not believe the general rules ever will be, perhaps cannot be, executed, except it is made a ministerial duty to read out of the membership and fellowship of Methodistic Christianity all who pertinaciously persist in contempt of them. If they are not well enough sustained by the letter and spirit of God's word to demand and deserve execution, they ought to be removed or modified; if they are, they ought to be enforced. And whatever demands enforcement upon the authority of God's word, belongs to that order of

administration which is monarchical. Or in other words, less offensive, perhaps, if God has left any ministerial agency in His spiritual kingdom, or church on earth, directly charged with the keeping and enforcement of His divine law, that agency must be in the hands of the ministers of His grace and word, in our opinion, more immediately and directly than is generally allowed.

In our rule for the trial of immoral members, the church has exceeded, in our opinion, the ground of demand, by using guard words, which to many minds place the finding of the committee rather too far in the region of the eternal judgment. The finding is intended to be simply that the crime charged and proved is expressly forbidden in the word of God; and the exclusion from the kingdom of grace and glory is subjoined as a thing of course. The conclusion is true, of

course, if the premise is true. There are many things done, which by common consent is regarded as forbidden in God's word; yet in the finding of a committee, if it enters into their minds that the verdict declares anything like reprobation, they will hesitate. We therefore submit, whether it is not safer and better policy that the issue should be upon the simple question, is the crime charged contrary to the word of God? Here, of course, the church would stand upon the word of God, both in its letter and spirit. And in all cases where the member is convicted of a life at variance with the law of God, or of indulgences at variance with the spirit of the Gospel, and refuses obedience, the minister ought to be invested with the direct right of expulsion-under the safeguard of a constitutional right of appeal. Why should a church want to vote on the question of expulsion, if the member is found guilty of a life contrary to God's holy word, and proves incorrigible in spirit? Such a vote could only be a popular method of determining whether the supreme law of Heaven shall rule, or yield. For if a popular vote can be rightfully demanded by the church on the question of expulsion in a case of pertinacious rebellion or unscriptural delinquency, it is because the issue by a popular vote is safer and wiser in the

moral and spiritual government of our Lord Jesus Christ than the infallible Oracle itself. Our simple position is, that if the church is a divine institution, made to exemplify the spiritual purity of the divine economy, and to be amenable to the divine law, that then it must follow, as a sort of logical conclusion, that the chief executives of such an institution must be its divinely appointed ministers.

If any of the direct power exercised by Mr. Wesley over his people in reference to their connection with his societies, descended to his followers in the American Methodist Church, it ceased almost entirely with the death of the old ministers and missionaries of Wesleyan days. A form of government was instituted, said to be modified more after the civil institutions of the country. A notion of things, which derived its fame more because it courted and won the popular admiration than because any one believed it would be a better guardian of the proper spirit of a self-denying religion. All schemes of church polity, formed in a way to guard men's civil rights and sanction their political prejudices, are presumptively defective; defective because contrary to the oft-repeated genius of the Christian church and spirit. These are emphatically not of the world, and therefore cannot be subsisted by worldly policies. God will protect and bless his church just as far as the church draws her life and forms her spirit out of the genius of the Bible, and no further. The adoption of the forms of civil and judicial proceedings may have been very natural; nay, it may have been even wise under the weight of popular demand. And we only intend to enter a caveat for ourself at this time against any further leaning that way. Heed not the croakings of a few novelists, a set of caterers to popular opinion, whose real reason for changes in our economy, whether they are aware of it or not, is clearly the charm which it is supposed the church will have for sinners when dressed in her politico-religious regalia. But oh what a wide mistake. Philosophers and far-seeing practical men have despised the sycophancy of many of these would be reformers. It is evident to every one, that can see to the bottom of these