SOME POINTS ON THE GENERAL CONFERENCE.
The General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church held in Philadelphia last May was in several respects remarkable. It was in the first place a picturesque body for the eye of a moral artist. The “war horses” of older days were there with the sound stentorian neigh which one expects to hear at a camp meeting. Probably there were more of these than in recent sessions of the body. There was William Taylor from everywhere, Ram Chandra Bose from India, and the venerable men of a former generation who are called Trimble and Curry. But the moral picturesqueness of the Conference lay rather in the variety and independence of young Americans from all sections. There was a very lively Bear from Wall Street, a still livelier lay preacher from New Jersey, a choice collection of young pastors from all over Zion, and a sprinkling of college men and newspaper men, bankers, railroad men and physicians, ex-generals, ex-chaplains, and farmers. The face of the body was so variegated and its separate limbs so independent that some spectators said it was not a body at all because it had no community of life and no head. Its independence of traditions and its refusal to be led by anybody added to the picturesqueness of the assembly. Nothing could be thrust down its throat. It threw all the men who successively tried to lead it. It voted with reference to an order of ideas and aspirations which no one can find written down in the press of the denomination. We believe there was but a single caucus, and that was a gathering of the colored delegates. It was a piece of most adroit management. It will probably be the last of that series of caucuses; and if it had been held half a day sooner, it would have defeated its own purpose. The white delegates would have defeated anybody who had asked them to go into a caucus. A very manly and self-respecting independence of dictation or management was in the air.
Another striking fact was the form which the independence of the body took on—the results which it reached. It might be called the Missionary Reform Conference. From the first it was clear that this branch of church work would receive a push forward on new lines. The single large debate of the session was over the proposition to locate a regular bishop in India. The bishops opposed it vigorously. The special adherents of “presbyter writ large” opposed it. And yet the measure received a majority of votes, and was defeated only by “dividing the house” and getting a lay majority against it to kill a clerical majority for it. After that defeat by a formal device for distributing a minority so as to give it veto power, the Conference had its own way. It made Chaplain McCabe Missionary Secretary, and elected William Taylor a Missionary Bishop for Africa, and it lifted Daniel Curry, who had led the movement for an Episcopal residence in India, sheer over the heads of all the editorial staff and set him down in the chair of the Quarterly Review. Each of these facts means more than meets the eye. Chaplain McCabe is the prince of collection-takers. The best man in the church to raise money is set to increasing missionary collections. William Taylor has been a bishop for thirty years—a bishop de facto—he is now bishop de jure in Africa. We doubt whether he will confine himself to Africa; but it will certainly require all of Africa to hold him. The Liberian grave-yard ceases to be the Methodist Africa. Bishop Taylor will lay siege to the whole continent—the Nile, the Soudan, the Congo, the Cape, as well as Liberia. Nor is this all. He believes in self-supporting missions, and will give a great impetus to the movement toward self-directing independence in all missions. Some time or other a mission must become a church; that time, many believe, is at hand in India, Africa and Europe. The reversal of judgment in Dr. Curry’s case is a conspicuous proof of the independence of the Conference. Eight years ago he was retired from the Christian Advocate at New York for insubordination. Part of his offense was a singular freedom of pen on this same subject of missions. For example, he once wrote (concerning the return visits of missionaries in the other hemisphere): “We need a few graves of missionaries in heathen soil,” or words of this significance. The General Conference was persuaded to vote him out in 1876; but the act emancipated the paper, and under Dr. J. M. Buckley it is independent in a wider sense than Dr. Curry ever dared to make it. And now with the burden of seventy-five years upon him, Dr. Curry succeeds the other venerable Daniel as the editor of the chief and only universal organ of the denomination. “Whedon on the Will” will probably cease to be the conspicuous feature of the Quarterly Review, and if it should drop out of the “course of study” for young ministers, the loss might be a gain.
The choice of the Conference for new bishops will probably be approved after some experience. Bishops Ninde and Mallalieu are probably universally popular selections. Bishops Walden and Fowler are yet to be approved by the intelligence of the denomination. But from one point of view the last two are better selections than the former. Bishops Ninde and Mallalieu have to be seasoned to a life of travel and hardship. They have lived in the study; and men past fifty (Bishop Mallalieu is 56) usually break down in the Methodist Episcopacy. The other pair of new bishops have long been inured to travel; and their physical preparation for the hard work before them may prove, on trial, that these were almost the best selections that could have been made. If Ninde and Mallalieu should soon follow Kingsley, Thompson, and the two Havens, the effect would probably be to direct the choice of the denomination in future elections to men accustomed to real itineracy. But, after all, on that view, or any other proper view, the largest bishop chosen by the last General Conference is the one who must write “Missionary” before his title. William Taylor has long been a bishop; his church has merely recognized, at rather a late hour, a fact which has long been conspicuous. Whether or not there is a great bishop, or more than one, among the other group of four remains to be proved by their work. There is little doubt that the judgment of the Conference was perplexed in the matter of voting Dr. J. H. Vincent into the Episcopacy, and so voting him out of that vast work which he supervises as the head of the Sunday-school organization. His friends will see in the vote of 178 for bishop, a proof that the Conference wanted him on the platform; they will see in the fact that for his old place the Conference gave him 316 ballots—all but nine of its votes—the reason why he was not made bishop. The figures are in both cases the highest possible compliment—both votes were complimentary.