the State. When, for instance, we read of the physical training compulsory at Athens from eighteen to twenty years of age, we think of the National Service League. 'The objects of the league are briefly to secure the peace and safety of the country and the Empire, and improve the moral and physical condition of the nation by bringing about the adoption of universal military training in order to form a national reserve. This training should be preceded by sound physical development, military drill and rifle shooting in all schools, accompanied by the instruction of all British boys and girls in patriotism and duty towards their country.' 1 This is a thoroughly Greek conception of the education of the young. Lastly, we cannot have enough of the Greek spirit. Their methods in education have largely perished, and their problems were simpler than ours. It would be a disaster to entrust the British Empire, or even Belgium or Switzerland, to the management of a Plato or an Aristotle. But the spirit is immortal; the spirit which inspired Goethe 'Im Ganzen, Guten, Schönen Resolut zu leben.' Have we, as a nation, as much grasp of the universal as the Germans, or as much love of truth in thought and speculation? The Greeks will help us here. In the sphere of the beautiful there is no doubt that they have much to teach us. Let us advance in the Greek spirit without fear to deal with new problems as they arise: 'Still nursing the unconquerable hope, Still clutching the inviolable shade.' 'The world is not grown old, Nor weary nor afraid : It is as bright, as bold As when it first was made.' The old Egyptian priest said by way of blame that the Greeks were always children; but we have been taught 'except ye turn and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.' A. H. CRUICKSHANK. A Nation in Arms, Sept. 1907. 2 Plato, Timaeus, p. 22. ART. VI.-METHODISM AND REUNION. The United Methodist Church Act, 1907. (London : On September 17, 1907, three societies of Methodists, known as the Methodist New Connexion, the United Methodist Free Churches, and the Bible Christians, availed themselves of an Act passed through Parliament during the course of the year at the instance of the three bodies, jointly and severally, to associate themselves in a new society, henceforth to be known in terms of the uniting Act as the United Methodist Church.' The Bible Christians were not properly Methodists except in so far as they owed their origin to the preaching of William O'Bryan, a Cornish farmer who had been excluded from fellowship by the Wesleyans, and as they were organized more or less on the Methodist model. They date from 1815, and for the most part belong to the West Country. But the two other societies were the offspring of direct secession from Wesleyanism, the second, as its name implies, being itself the result of former reunion among separatists. The union which has now been constituted does not take account of what is still the largest and most important section of Methodists existing outside the parent body, namely the Primitives; and in spite of every separation which occurred during the first sixty years after their founder's death the Wesleyans still outweigh alike in numbers and influence all the others put together. Roughly, the 'membership of the United Methodist Church is estimated at 160,000. There are about 800 ministers, and between five and six thousand lay preachers. The union took place in the Mecca of Methodism, Wesley's Chapel in City Road. The President of the Primitive Methodists was in attendance. And it is not improbable that the breaches in English Methodism are in a fair way to being healed, and that a not distant future may witness, what has practically never been attained in the past but must be desired by all who abhor division, unity among the people called Methodists.' Bearing in mind that the Bible Christians are connected with Wesley only through their founder, from whom they received the alternative title of Bryanites, it will conduce to clearness if we represent the divisions and reunions of Methodism as follows: How fruitful in division Methodism has been in the past may be gathered still further from the fact that this chart takes no account of one or two smaller sections, which, after a brief separate existence, have either united with one of the larger bodies or been absorbed in the general life of the nation. It is interesting to remember that the Salvation Army, though not Methodist in structure, is yet historically developed from the New Connexion, of which General Booth was a minister from 1850 to 1861. The Army has much of the spirit, if it has renounced the polity, of Methodism. The story of Wesleyan divisions is not in itself a very edifying record. They present a very different picture from those, for example, of Scottish Presbyterianism, which are at least dignified by conscience and ennobled by sacrifice. Moreover there is a sweetness and light about John Wesley himself that hardly seems to characterize the public proceedings of his societies in the first half of the succeeding century. The spiritual refinement of Dinah Morris, which we breathe over and over again in the earlier chronicles of Methodism, seems conspicuously absent from such sidelights as, for example, Dr. Gregory has given us on the years of controversy which succeeded the attempted 'pacification of 1795. Mr. John Wesley controls where Dr. Jabez Bunting provokes antagonism. There is a tendency to domineer, to pursue personalities, to adopt unworthy methods of attack, of which the members of the Holy Club' would have been quite incapable. In spite of the world-wide character of Methodism, a testimony not to be ignored to the genuinely spiritual forces of which it has been made the medium,there is undoubtedly too often in the proceedings of Conference a parochial element which in the eye of the casual reader gives to its heated debates the appearance of storm in a teacup. Ebenezer Chapel in Leeds-which, after serving as a glass and china store, must shortly give way to street improvement was the scene of the first breach in Methodism. There on August 9, 1797, assembled a small group of ministers and laymen, who definitely renounced their former fellowship and established a new connexion.' Methodism as Wesley organized it was not democratic. Nothing shews more clearly than the early history of Conference that in the formation of his societies Wesley did not conceive of himself as inaugurating a self-governing church. These societies formed a connexion-the word is Wesley's own-depending upon himself for direction, leadership, fatherhood. It was he who provided them with local government, with itinerant preachers, and, in so far as this was not supplied by the parish clergy, with the Lord's Supper. Membership in these communities depended not upon acknowledgement of a common faith, but upon mutual recognition of a common religious experience. Wesley would himself have been ineligible before May 24, 1738, when among the Moravians in Aldersgate Street he attained assurance. Churches are built upon confession of the Name. No one knew better than Wesley himself that inward experience, essential though it may be to the communion of saints, is a precarious criterion of membership in the visible Church. His horizon was too wide to leave him a Novatianist. His societies were associations for promoting the life of sanctification on the basis of an assurance of forgiveness, which he held to be the full realization of Christianity. And Conference in its origin was an advisory council which he associated with himself in the oversight of these societies. The Conference of 1744 was simply a meeting at the Foundry, more or less informal, to which Wesley summoned five other likeminded clergymen, with whom he associated four of his own preachers. As time went on the preachers predominated. But throughout his life it was loyalty to Wesley himself as a spiritual father that was the true government of Methodism. In 1784 Wesley, now over eighty, yielded to the plan proposed to him by others for incorporating the 'Conference of the people called Methodists,' and signed the Deed of Declaration. This constituted a conference of a hundred members nominated by Wesley himself from among his preachers and empowered to maintain their numbers by co-optation. They were to appoint preachers and exercise such other functions of government as the founder had hitherto retained in his own hands. The Wesleyan Conference of the present day is of course a wider and more representative body, but the 'Legal Hundred' must still register its acts before they can obtain the force of law. Whether the Conference as incorporated by Wesley is technically clerical or not is immaterial to the issue. That it actually became a ministerial body when, two years after Wesley's death, sacraments were systematically ministered in the societies, is certain. The point is that it was an authority imposed from above upon a community which had no voice in its own government. That Wesley would rather, had it been possible, that the spiritual advancement of his flock should have been entrusted to a personal successor like Fletcher of Madeley— who, however, died before him-is tolerably certain. That |