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THE EPWORTH LEAGUE-ITS OPPORTUNITIES

AND PERILS.

BY E. A. SCHELL, D.D.

THE Epworth League is an organization implying on the part of its members the deepest religious experience and calling for all the Christian activities in which the young people of Methodism may properly engage. Terms, by their very use, limit and circumscribe the ideas they are intended to represent and describe. The name of the young people's society whose oppor-tunities and perils it is here a privilege briefly to discuss is no exception to the rule. The organization is the growth of more than twenty years; the appellation is an apt fancy quickly seized upon as a compromise among diverse names, all in the minds of their proposers expressive of the same idea. If the name seems narrow and denominational it is wholly because one cannot express the growth of twenty years and what is still enlarging in a single term. If its fractional relation to the denominational unit is ill-defined by the words "Epworth League," it is the fault of the term, just as the inability to express one third in decimal form is the fault of our series of notation. The name is but an attempt to picture externally an organization which makes its appeal to the spirit and addresses itself to the hidden seats of character and service.

To have done with the disagreeable part of the subject as soon as possible, let us first consider the perils to which the organization is subjected:

1. There is the danger, common to all organizations, that it will cramp life. To separate a part of the Church and restrict it by a constitution and by-laws is, in the minds of many, like adding a wheel or pulley to already complicated machinery. It may be feared that it will dwarf energy and render some power ineffective. Just as increased friction is inseparable from the thought of a channel to conduct water to a mill-wheel and loss of energy is associated with running an electrical current over the wire of a circuit, so the Church, in maintaining the Epworth League, must take into account the probability of friction and, here and there, of dwarfed powers and unapplied energy. The discriminating mind will at once concede this danger, but will consider it better to liberate a part of the potential energy in a mill-pond by a race than lose it all. Better a diminished electrical energy than no current whatever; so, better the organ

ization of the Methodist young people as a corps or division in the Church than that they remain unused or be divided up into guerrilla bands, each fighting for its own purposes.

2. More real is the peril that the young people may esteem their organization equal or superior to the Church and become impatient of authority. Insubordination is the common sin of new recruits. It is the special failing of youth on the verge of manhood to esteem lightly the advice of age and experience and become inflamed with the ardour of its own opinions. Every parent, as he bends over the face of his babe in the cradle must face the possibility of a thankless child and of some day having his heart-strings torn by a rebellious or disobedient son. Nature has provided the surest guarantee against this in parental and filial affection; and the Methodist Church is protected in the same way. The members of the Epworth League are her children. They were cradled in her arms and protected by her love; and better a thousand times the filial affection these young people feel than outside admonitions that they should be loyal to their Church.

3. A third source of danger is found in the tendency to rely merely upon numbers. A growing chapter roll is a welcome sight; but so far as that may indicate, the Epworth League is only a mere machine. If the League be not a living, glowing organism in every church, with power to communicate spiritual and intellectual life, and be not attended by transformations both in character and opinion, it were better abolished. The only conclusive evidence that the League is a living, spiritual organism must be the communication of its life to others; and the test of its usefulness and permanency will not be the increase or decrease of the chapter roll, but the sum total of enlargement and quickening brought to individuals and churches in the wide circle of Methodism.

The indifference of some pastors and the consequent estrangement of their young people; the drawing of a line of demarcation between the older and younger members of the Church; a lessened attendance at the regular midweek prayer-meeting, occasioned by the establishment of a young people's prayermeeting; the frittering away of energy in a mere hurrah; narrowness and exclusiveness-these are all additional and real perils, but the less dangerous because of the warnings continually uttered against them.

By its numbers, spirit, and religious inheritance the Epworth League is fitted for great enterprises. There are, in the Methodist Episcopal Church, eighty chapters which average over four hun

dred members each; there are five hundred with an average of three hundred members each, the eleven thousand two hundred chapters having at a very conservative estimate sixty each. In addition there are two thousand Junior Leagues, with an average membership of forty each. The whole forms a glorious company of youth and young manhood seven hundred and fifty thousand strong, young, and therefore near to those celestial fountains of existence whence inspiration floods the heart and hope illumines the brain-youth, like the morning, clear, fresh, radiant, the dewdrops on its grasses and leaves transfigured by the rising sun into diamonds; a large segment of a great Church, with five generations of Christian ancestry behind them, dedicated to Christ from their birth hour, and, therefore, the very chivalry of Methodism. Opportunities are all about them.

The Church has a right to expect great things from the League.. 1. The revival opportunity must claim precedence over all. Methodism has always been a Church of revivals. You can trace all over the country the preachers who organized the Methodist Church at the Christmas Conference by the revival fires they kindled. Everywhere they heralded both God's loveand the judgment; and, under the might of the Holy Spirit. which breathed through their lips, men fell before them convicted of sin and rose up justified. These preachers exercised every form of ministerial office. They were at the same time apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers and evangelists. The people co-operated with them. So it must continue to the end. No church order can legitimately interfere with the exercise of any ministerial duty. The preacher dare neglect neither his exe-. cutive nor his evangelistic function. Nor may the people abdicate the privilege and duty of co-operation with their pastor by employing someone in their stead. That the pastor act as an evangelist and the people co-operate with him is a condition absolutely essential to a revival. What blessedness would come to the Church were the revival conditions prevailing everywhere! There is no sure remedy for indifference, formalism, and legalism save the revival. Yearning for souls is the secret of all pulpit success. It gives the power to utter words of beauty which touch the heart and the inexpressible charm which wins the fancy of open-minded hearers.

The other element, co-operation on the part of the congregation, it is the glorious opportunity of the Epworth League to furnish.. It holds potentially within itself songs which sweeten and soften, the visitation so necessary, the testimonies which thrill and burn, and the prayers which smite through the soul and move to

penitence. Its members, fresh from the altars where they found Jesus and caught whispers of His forgiving love, constitute the spiritual aristocracy of mankind. Their youth is their strength. They have the power of doing. Their intelligence and widening experience are conjoined with force. The joyous fulness of their youth magnetizes. Their vivid insight discerns the only path of duty amid a thousand diverging ways. Their nearness to God, their purity of heart, which mirrors forth the beauty of their Lord, and their hopeful purpose point to them as co-partners in a revival which shall shake to its foundations the kingdom of darkness. The significance of organization can have no better illustration than in this revival opportunity. Revivals in detached communities lose much of their force because of the narrow bounds in which they are felt. Revivals, like prohibition, should be by States or nations. This organization has the opportunity of kindling a revival in thousands of detached communities and of bringing them so close to one another that they will flow together, coalesce, and stir the nation to its religious awakening.

2. There is plainly an opportunity of attaching many more loyally to Methodism. To some this will scarcely seem to rise to the height of a great opportunity. Those, however, who know well the spirit of the Church, the minuteness and flexibility of its organization, its simplicity, the broad charity of its theology, its high-toned morality, and its rapid extension will recognize the importance of the opportunity. "Methodism," says Luke Tyerman, "is the greatest fact in the history of the Church of Christ." At any rate, it was an innovation on all previous reforms in the Church. It broke with the customs of the times in two particulars: it opposed the tendency of most religionists to assert the majesty of God at the expense of His love; and it advocated the emancipation of conscience from the burden of legalism. These positions it has maintained ever since. Either would have made it deservedly conspicuous in religious progress; both conjoined make the movement epochal.

Methodism, like Christianity in general, proposes no easy service. In recent years there has been a tendency to drift away from the Church, some being won by the less serious tone and others by the more rigid social exclusiveness found elsewhere. The Epworth League has made this outward current thoughtful by setting before its members the highest New Testament standard of experience and life. This standard is in direct opposition to social exclusiveness, and directs the path of conduct midway between asceticism and license. In addition,

the Epworth League has furnished for itself a means for social intercourse and a channel for the courtesies and amenities which so beautify life. It has also enlarged the knowledge of the history, doctrines, and present work of the great Church of which it forms a part. To know Methodism is to love it; and the very name and department work of the Epworth League bind its members more closely to the Church. A lessened drifting away from the Church is already noticed; and if it remain true to its high standard the Epworth League will prove a magnetic pole toward which the thoughtful, charitable, strong natures of the next decade will gravitate.

3. The educational opportunity. The opportunity is unparalleled for increasing general intelligence by general reading, thereby inspiring our youth to seek a higher education and promoting Bible study. With all our appliances education is a difficult matter and the average of intelligence extremely low. Even with common schools, Sunday-schools, sermons, lectures, books, and daily papers in almost endless editions the work is imperfectly done. "Give me a fulcrum," said Archimedes, "and I will lift the world." But where is the lever long enough or the fulcrum stout enough on which to lift the whole generation intellectually? It is a hard task to interpenetrate a whole mass with a single idea; how much more to mellow and ripen the thought of an age by idea after idea, as ray by ray the sun mellows and ripens an apple! To an educator any company of people, however small, affords a chance for diffusing intelligence.

What an unparalleled educational opportunity, then, is here presented in this company of seven hundred and fifty thousand compacted and loyal Methodists, waiting to be directed and led! Here is a gateway to the brain kingdom and an avenue to the seats of imperial intelligence. It is all-important to the Church not only to guard these approaches, a sleepless sentinel against impure literature, but also to utilize them for the commerce of Christian ideas. Suppose that this entire membership of the Epworth League, having a taste for good reading, could next year be added to the class and prayer-meetings, the social gatherings, and the Sunday-schools of the Methodist Episcopal Church. They would bring a revival worth having. With good reading comes an enlarged vocabulary and the power of expression; therefore interesting and stimulating recitals of Christian experience would follow. There would be an end at once to much of the vapid nonsense which passes for "testimony." The Sunday-schools would be full of intelligent teachers. The

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