FOOTNOTES:
[137] Since the foregoing was written, it has been ascertained that the Wesleyan Methodists number 142,000, or more than one-fifth of the entire population (1850).
CHAPTER LIV.
1854-1855.
Resignation on the Class-Meeting Question.—Discussion.
The last important connexional discussion in which Dr. Ryerson was engaged was on the Class-Meeting Question. For years he had objected, chiefly privately, amongst his brethren, clerical and lay, to making attendance at class-meeting a condition of membership in the Wesleyan Methodist Church of Canada. For various reasons, few members of the Conference desired to have the subject publicly discussed in Conference. They felt that a serious practical difficulty surrounded the question itself—difficulties which could not be surmounted by public discussion. Many of them also knew that in calmly discussing, without personal feeling, the abstract principle involved in the rule, it would be found that their judgment and loyal feeling to the Church would go one way, while their uniform practice in the administration of the rule would often be at variance with both, owing to peculiar circumstances. On the other hand, Dr. Ryerson thought, that not only should preaching and practice in this matter agree, but that theory and practice should also agree. And hence he felt that as his preaching and practice agreed in opposition to the rule, he was not loyal to the Church in ministering at her altars, while he was heartily and conscientiously opposed to the fundamental rule of membership prescribed by that Church. Hence, on the 2nd of January, 1854, he addressed the following letter to the Rev. Dr. Wood, President of the Wesleyan Methodist Conference (I omit extraneous matter):—
I hereby resign into your hands, my membership in the Conference, and my office as a minister of the Wesleyan Methodist Church—herewith enclosing my parchments of ordination, thus taking my place among the laity of the Church.
I have resolved to take this step after long and serious deliberation, but without consulting any human being. I take this step, not because I do not believe that the Wesleyan ministry is as fully authorized as the ministry of any other branch of the universal Church, to exercise all the functions of Christian priesthood; not because I do not as unfeignedly as ever subscribe to all the doctrines of the Wesleyan Church; not because I do not profoundly honour the integrity and devotedness of the Wesleyan ministry; not because I do not think that Christian discipline is as strictly, if not more strictly, maintained in the Wesleyan Church than in any other Christian Church in the world.