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conscience was clear because he believed he had but done his duty and followed the demands of necessity, seemed to rise above the general dejection; he sought the presiding elder, who was more discouraged than all others, and requested the privilege of preaching. The trumpet called the assembly; he mounted the platform, took for his text, "The gates of hell shall not prevail against it," and at the end of half an hour the power of God, according to his favorite phrase, was felt in the whole congregation. This energetic and decided character, who knew how to secure advantage in the most unfavorable circumstances, whom the most unforeseen occurrences found always prepared, would be specially pleasing to the easily swayed population of the West, in whose eyes force, whether moral or physical, was the certain sign of superiority. The facility with which Cartwright passed from grave to gay, his fertility in anecdote and similitude, his cutting sarcasm and sudden bursts of impetuosity, even his eccentricities, all were in contrast with the solemn and set manners of the ordinary preachers, all charmed and captivated the multitude. He was without equal as a purely extemporaneous speaker; he must be inspired by the sight of a crowd, by some view of nature, or some special circumstances, and the preparations of closet study availed him little. The General Conference was once held in Boston, and the Methodists, whom the other sects affected somewhat to despise as an uncultured class, felt called upon to present a good figure in a city like the Athens of America. They sought to put forward the flower of their pulpit talent, and counted specially upon Cartwright. The latter was well impressed with the importance of sustaining not only his own reputation and the honor of the Church, but that also of the Western people, and took great pains to prepare two sermons. The Bostonians only said that he preached like others. Mortified at such a judgment, he set out the third time in utter freedom from preparation, preached as if he were in the woods, and achieved immense success.

With so much popularity as he enjoyed in the West, Cartwright might have aspired to any civil honor; but he always kept himself out of politics, and if he once sought the suffrages of his fellow-citizens it was from conviction of duty. He had settled with his family in Illinois, when the Legislature was

hesitating about the repeal of the law abolishing slavery. Cartwright readily allowed himself to be chosen as deputy that he might speak and vote against the repeal, and as soon as victory was secured he refused to be longer a candidate. He seems to have conceived during his short civil career an unfavorable notion of the prevalent political morality. He had specially a bitter memory of his own treatment in the attacks to which he was subject from the moment of his appearing as a candidate. He was even accused of refusing to pay his debts and of perjury. He treated his political adversaries in the same style as he did his religious opponents, and with like success. Meeting one day a voter who had sworn to give him a horse-whipping, Cartwright made himself known, said he did not wish to live in perpetual apprehension, and demanded of his adversary the immediate execution of his menace. At the same time he rolled up his sleeves ready for the encounter, but thereupon was only met by the proffer of his opponent's hand in reconciliation, and the latter was subsequently his warmest partisan.

A General Conference of the American Methodist Church was held at Indianapolis in 1857. The English Methodists were then represented by a delegate, Dr. Jobson, who saw and heard Cartwright, then in his seventy-third year, and he gives the following account of him:

"The second person in the assembly in weight of years is Dr. Peter Cartwright, a tall, robust man, whose physiognomy and speech both betray a mingling of primitive simplicity with a large touch of humor. His flesh, solid as marble, his rough and determined air, bespeak a man of intrepidity and habituation to fatigue. Yet the signs of good humor and kindness are not wanting, for his mouth, eyes, and mobile cheeks show a sympathetic and tender nature. His head is strong, and reposes firmly upon large and robust shoulders; his forehead is large, and covered with a forest of gray hair. His eyes, of very deep color, gleam like two fires under the bristling eyebrows, and the two wrinkles seen at the corners present a marked feature in his physiognomy. His skin is much browned by the sun. His voice trembles when he begins to speak, but soon he recovers his old power, and the rich tones of the organ are at his command. The orator appears in it

and plays skillfully all its chords. At times, to sharpen his darts and make them more penetrating, he assumes derisively a tragic tone and air; then, after having related some anecdote which convulses his auditors with laughter, while nothing of his own solemn gravity is lost, he falls upon his antagonist with an irresistible vigor and crushes him with sarcasm. Is he aroused by the presence of numerous opponents, he sends forth, stroke upon stroke, keen arguments, arrows lively and burning like lightning; then, with voice unchecked as a tempest in the woods, he bursts out in objurgations and reproaches in such force as to overbear his antagonists and fill his hearers with a kind of terror. He seems to have received a special mission to pursue and cover with confusion the innovators who would put the institutions of Methodism in peril. He performs this duty with all the ardor of a forest huntsman, and spares neither bishops, delegates, nor presiding elders, nor ministers, nor laymen. He does terrible execution sometimes, and appears at the tribune of the Conference as intrepid and irresistible as the lion in his own domain. His name alone would draw multitudes to a camp-meeting; and under that voice, powerful, musical, and resonant as a trumpet, and which by turns grows soft or threatening as he deplores the sinner's condition or announces his punishment, the multitude bow their heads, and are swayed like the grass of the prairies beneath the wind."

This account shows us Cartwright as the determined adversary of all innovation; he himself records all the contests in which he has engaged at the General Conferences. Every thing in the Church to which he devoted his life is sacred to him; he is unwilling that its rules and organization be changed, lest by this means its spirit and fruitfulness should suffer. It is not only the ancient rules that he defends, but he regrets also the old times, usages, and manners.

We had no Missionary Society; no Sunday-School Society; no Church papers; no Bible or Tract Societies; no colleges, seminaries, academies, or universities; all the efforts to get up colleges under the patronage of the Methodist Episcopal Church in these United States and Territories were signal failures. We had no pewed churches, no choirs, no organs; in a word, we had no instrumental music in our churches anywhere. The Methodists in that early day dressed plain; attended their meetings faithfully,

especially preaching, prayer and class meetings; they wore no jewelry, no ruffles; they would frequently walk three or four miles. to class-meeting, and home again, on Sundays; they would go thirty or forty miles to their quarterly meetings, and think it a glorious privilege to meet their presiding elder, and the rest of the preachers. They could, nearly every soul of them, sing out hymns and spiritual songs. They religiously kept the Sabbath day; many of them abstained from dram-drinking, not because the temperance reformation was ever heard of in that day, but because it was interdicted in the General Rules of our Discipline. The Methodists of that day stood up and faced their preacher when they sung; they kneeled down in the public congregation as well as elsewhere, when the preacher said, "Let us pray." There was no standing among the members in time of prayer, especially the abominable practice of sitting down during that exercise was unknown among early Methodists. Parents did not allow their children to go to balls or plays; they did not send them to dancing-schools; they generally fasted once a week, and almost univerally on the Friday before each quarterly meeting. If the Methodists had dressed in the same "superfluity of naughtiness" then as they do now, there were very few even out of the Church that would have any confidence in their religion. But 0, how have things changed for the worse in this educational age of the world!

There is no better justification than this of what Horace has said concerning old men, and one could not in higher degree appear as laudator temporis acti. It is unreasonable to make the matter of salvation depend on costume, or to see in any particular choice of diet an invincible obstacle to the practice of virtue. Nevertheless, if we are to pardon this hostility to luxury and the refinements of civilization, we may especially do so in a child of the woods, recognizing also that there is in the complaints of Cartwright a basis of truth. Having seen the days of vigor in Methodism, the aged preacher has lived to see the commencement of its decay.

The fecundity of Methodism, as we have striven to show, lies chiefly in its organization, which had for its object to develop and nourish the spirit of propagandism. It called forth unceasingly within the mass of adherents new apostles whose efforts were assured of at least a temporary success, and whose zeal might reanimate the general torpor. There was a constant mutual stimulation on the part of clergy and laity. The system of rotation in circuits was in this respect beneficial, for, by bringing preachers and audience together who had not

had opportunity to familiarize themselves with each other, it demanded unusual effort on the one side, and rendered attention more easy on the other through the incitement of novelty. In fine, the itinerancy of the preachers, the facility of the arrangement for establishing class leaders and exhorters, allowed Methodism to make its influence felt in every place and at all times, and in this view we may say that Wesley bestowed upon Protestantism an element of force, and a lever analogous to that secured by the religious orders in the Catholic Church. Statistics alone can show in full the propagating energy of Methodism and the rapidity of its progress. When the Methodist Church was organized at the Baltimore Conference it counted eighty-six preachers and a little less than fifteen thousand members; in 1843, sixty years later, there were four thousand itinerant preachers, more than one million communicants, and the number of attendants upon its services was reckoned at five millions in addition. While the most prosperous of the other sects had increased simply tenfold, Methodism had grown in the proportion of one to seventy-one. Now, its ratio of increase follows, if it does not surpass, that of the general population.

But in England, Methodism has nearly lost the spirit and propagating energy which Wesley sought to impart to his society. Not only has individual activity declined because of the greater frequency and facility of public effort which has put an end to private assemblies and spontaneous preaching, but a revolution has taken place in the ministry. If in the Catholic Church, despite the obligation to celibacy and the vow of poverty, all the religious orders have fallen into degeneracy, and have only recovered themselves by successive reformatory movements, it is yet more to be expected that the tendency to become stationary, to adopt a more settled life in place of the fatigue and uncertainties of the itinerancy, would prevail with a Protestant clergy who are married, and with whom the cares of a family qualify the force of religious zeal. To-day beside each English church stands the Methodist chapel; in one is a minister, in the other a preacher. The two clergy and the two Churches live the same life, hardly separated by the slightest differences. A like transformation is being accomplished in Canada, where the itinerants are FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXV.—6

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