The gain for the century is 17,413. The 287 have been multiplied by 62; average annual gain, 174.
The beginning in a sail loft in 1766, the erection shortly afterward of a church costing $3,000, gave no more promise of ecclesiastical wealth than it did of growth in membership. Our 27,000 churches, worth $116,000,000, show a development of resources as wonderful as a miracle. It takes now between $23,000,000 and $24,000,000 a year to carry on the work of the Methodist Episcopal Church, to say nothing about its universities, colleges, and hospitals. The consecration of wealth is truly stupendous. Methodists have not been stingy.
Methodism was ninth among Protestant denominations in number of churches in 1775, and third in number of communicants in 1800. It soon advanced to first place in numbers, and easily holds this place at the end of the century. It was only a handful of corn on the top of the mountains at the beginning. How wonderfully has God multiplied it!
It is pertinent to ask, How did it win its success?
Not by immigration, as many other Churches did. Roman Catholics came here from Europe by hundreds of thousands. The Lutheran, Reformed German, and Presbyterian Churches gained immensely by the streams of immigration. But Methodists and Baptists have grown out of American soil and drawn their chief strength from the surrounding elements.
Not by proselytism. We have lost hundreds of thousands of converts; we have gained comparatively few in return from the denominations we have fed. We would like to hold all who are converted at our altars, but we do not feel that our losses have impoverished us, though they have enriched our neighbors.
Not because of wealth, social prestige, ecclesiastical antiquity, or what an historian calls "the aristocracy of education and position." Other Churches had these; we began with nothing but a needy field and earnest men, full of the Holy Ghost and flaming with zeal for the Gospel.
Not by our machinery and methods. These were powerful, even providential, aids; but if we ever come to depend on these alone Methodism will be a great system of enginery, with wheels, pulleys, cogs, and joints, all silent and inert, because the boilers are cold. It was not our itinerancy, our class meetings, our Conferences, or our methods which gave us success.
Our hosts have been won, by the power of the Gospel manifested in a real, religious experience, from the vast classes of unconverted persons. We have regarded these, wherever we found them, as legitimate prey. We count it a special honor that our millions are trophies won for Christ from the masses of godless, indifferent, unconverted persons. The late Dr. John Hall once said that he specially honored the Methodist Church for the importance it attaches to conversion. The power of Methodism is spiritual in its nature.
I do not believe a greater boon could be asked for our Church in the twentieth century than that it might continue to regard it as its special task to call men and women to repentance and insist upon an experience such as our fathers enjoyed and we profess.