Chapter XLVII (2)

I have no doubt it would be pleasing for you to know, on this
your centennial anniversary, how the younger members of our
Conference feel on vital matters pertaining to the Church of
your and their choice, and in which you have been a minister for
three quarters of a century. I think I may safely say that they
are loyal to the great doctrines of the Bible as maintained by
the Church during the hundred years you have lived. They maintain
the Bible as the only infallible standard of Christian faith and
practice. They believe and preach the doctrines of depravity,
atonement, regeneration, witness of the Spirit, adoption,
sanctification, eternal salvation for the finally holy, and
eternal punishment for the finally impenitent. While they hold
with tenacity to the doctrines of their own Church, they are not
narrow or bigoted, but with broad Christian hearts they repeat
the Apostle’s Creed with the whole Church of Christ, and gladly
co-operate with Christians of every name for the salvation of
men. They hold fast to the great working forces of the Church
as they have inherited them from you and your colaborers. They
believe in revivals of religion having their inspiration in
God’s Spirit, the class and prayer meeting, and the recognized
instrumentalities of the Church for carrying on her work. If they
criticise, it is not to destroy, but to maintain and upbuild
the Church of their choice. They believe that the great mission
of the Church is the one announced by our fathers, “To spread
scriptural holiness over these lands.” Whatever differences
may exist among them on definitions, I believe they are one in
carrying out the spirit of her early mission, which, I trust,
will continue to be her mission until the world shall be redeemed
to God. They do not fear, but welcome, the highest culture and
the deepest, broadest learning, but they would make it all
tributary to the spread of scriptural holiness.

They are loyal to the fathers of the Church; they reverence our
old men; they are proud of them; they would as soon be seen
striking a blow at their own earthly parents as at the fathers of
Methodism; they hold them highly in esteem for their characters’
sake, for the work’s sake, for the Church’s sake to which they
have given their best days and their noblest powers. Every gray
hair on your head, and every wrinkle on that time-scarred brow,
they love and reverence. They are marks of beauty which they
would not exchange for the brightest bloom of youth. In the
esteem they hold you, they desire to express that which they hold
toward all their fathers in the ministry. But in your presence,
and in view of the exercises that are to follow, I dare not
detain you. Your example forbids me to speak longer. To you may
fitly be applied the epigrammatic eulogy once applied to the
philosopher and patriot of America, Benjamin Franklin: “He never
spoke a word too soon, he never spoke a word too late; he never
spoke a word too much, he never failed to speak the right word at
the right season.”

And now, venerable father, accept again our heartiest
congratulations. We do not say to-day, “My father, my father,
the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof!” for our
Elijah is not yet going. We trust the time is yet distant ere
you depart for heaven. Though, like Paul, to depart and be with
Christ is better for you, yet for you to abide in the flesh is
more needful for us. When the time comes, you will die grandly
and serenely, as an old man and a Christian should die. Cicero,
the greatest of Roman orators, said: “Young men seem to me to
die just as when the violence of flame is extinguished by a
flood of water; whereas old men die as the exhausted fire goes
out—spontaneously—without the exertion of any force: and as
fruits, when they are green, are plucked by force from the trees,
but when ripe or mellow drop off, so violence takes away their
lives from youths—maturity from old men; a state which to me,
indeed, is so delightful, that the nearer I approach to death
the more I seem, as it were, to be getting sight of land, and
at length, after a long voyage, to be coming into harbor.” But
Cicero lived but sixty-three years, and old Cato, into whose
mouth he put these words, is represented as but eighty-four; but,
sir, they were boys by the side of you. You have lived _a hundred
years_! You are a Christian, too, and a bright vision is before
you. As the traveler in a region of mountains ascends a distant
summit, and when he has reached it finds another before him and
ascends that, and another, and another, and each time finds that
the topmost point is still distant, so you climbed to childhood,
then to youth, then to manhood, then to middle age, then to old
age, and since then you have been climbing through steps for
which our language has no single word, until now you have reached
an age when we can call you our centenarian, and soon you will
reach the summit, when you will greet, not the distant peaks of
earth, but the mountains of glory, where you shall go on forever,
and, with Paul, exclaim with rapture, “Henceforth there is laid
up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous
judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto
all them also that love his appearing.”

Rev. Jacob Todd, A. M., of the Philadelphia Conference, delivered the following address:—

DR. TODD’S ADDRESS.

Our venerable Father Boehm belongs to the whole Methodist
Episcopal Church, and not to any particular locality. We think
of him as the friend and companion of Asbury, the apostle of
American Methodism, and, in consequence, feel that the whole
country can lay claim to him. We could not localize him if we
would, and would not if we could.

I do not know that any particular credit attaches to a locality
because a great and good man was born there, for the simple
reason that he could not help it. The Hibernian who was born in
the country said he could have been born in the city just as well
if he had desired, but that he preferred the country. Perhaps
if Father Boehm had been consulted he would have preferred the
city. But although the place of our birth is purely accidental,
there is a mystic cord which binds our hearts to our childhood
home through life, such as links us to no other spot on earth.
Representing the Philadelphia Conference, within whose bounds our
venerated father was born, I, with my fellow-committeemen, Drs.
Chaplain and Robinson, feel that our claim is not less, if it be
not more, than that of any others present. Usually upon festive
occasions the children come back from abroad to the paternal
home to do honor to the parents. That order is reversed to-day.
We come from the old homestead to seek out our Father Boehm,
who has gone abroad, and offer him the congratulations of the
Philadelphia Conference upon the one hundredth anniversary of his
birthday.

There have been some changes at home since he left: there are
more farms in Lancaster County now, and less woods; there are
more villages, towns, and cities, and less country. Those who
were boys then are tottering upon staffs now. There are many,
many more mounds in the grave-yard. The little societies which
met in barns and school-houses then, and were called Methodists
in derision, have since built themselves houses of worship,
and are now a strong and respected Church in the community.
The old house, around which in boyhood he played, is gone; but
the springs sparkle just the same, and the brooks bubble and
flow on as of yore; the sky stretches its big arch overhead,
and the stars twinkle, and the sun’s huge disk of burnished
gold dazzles, just the same as they did a hundred years ago.
The old German Bibles are growing scarce, but English Bibles
in greater numbers have taken their places, and the precious
truths of God’s revelation remain the same through all languages.
The same doctrines are preached, the same hymns are sung, the
same experiences are related, and the same prayers are offered,
as when he in boyhood first attended a Methodist meeting. Men
and their works have all changed; but God, and nature, and the
religion of Jesus, are the same yesterday, to-day, and forever.

And Father Boehm has changed some, too, since he left home. He
is the youngest man for his years that ever I knew, but still I
notice that time has made some deep furrows in his cheeks, and
the frost has settled in his hair. That stalwart form which, in
other years, bore Bishop Asbury up many a hill and over many a
stream, is bent and feeble now; and his voice, which used to
ring out loud and clear as he delivered his Gospel message among
the mountains of Pennsylvania, now shows signs of faltering and
trembling. But these changes are only on the outside; time has
not been able to alter him at the core. His memory still is good;
his mind is clear; his heart is just as warm, and his faith as
strong, as they were in the days long past and gone. The “outward
man” may perish, “yet the inward man is renewed day by day.”
God’s own image, over which time has no control, is stamped
within him, and there are no wrinkles in his soul.

A hundred years have rolled away since he first opened his eyes
upon the light of a day in June. It does not seem so long a time
in this age of crowding events; yet it takes us back to when the
fever of the Revolution was in the blood of our ancestors. The
musketry of Concord and Lexington was still echoing in the air
when Father Boehm was born; and he was in his cradle when the
Declaration of Independence was signed. His childhood heard the
tramp of Continental soldiers, and the guns of Valley Forge and
Germantown sounded in his youthful ears. American Methodism was
only a child of nine years old, and was still unweaned from its
mother, when he was born. Why, nineteen such men, the one born
upon the day on which the other died, would take us back beyond
the birth of Christ! This one life spans a continent of history,
arches over the graves of three generations, and bridges a chasm
of forgetfulness a hundred years wide; so that over it the
memories of long ago can travel down to us.

But a man’s life cannot be measured by the number of seasons
that come and go. Some men live more in ten years than others
do in fifty. Our lives are measured not by clock-ticks, but
by heart-throbs. The excitements of the times, the rush of
events, and the activities of the mind, determine a man’s age
more than the roll of years. Father Boehm has lived longer than
Methuselah, if we reckon time in this way. Within his life-time
the application of steam to mechanical purposes has taken place.
Instead of the clink on the anvil, which he heard in boyhood, now
the heavy thud of the steam trip-hammer shakes the earth; and the
old Conestoga wagons of earlier days have almost disappeared from
the turnpike, and, instead, the iron horse now tosses his smoky
main, and snorts and rushes like the wind through mountains, over
valleys, and across the plain. It had taken Methuselah not less
than a week—possibly a whole month—to come from Philadelphia to
New York. Father Boehm has lived in an age when men breakfast
in Philadelphia, dine in New York, and sup again at home. Within
the last century the lightning has been harnessed and made to do
man’s bidding. By means of the telegraph men are talking across
continents and under oceans with each other, as though they stood
face to face. Messages are sent and answers received in an hour,
which would have required months or years a century ago. He has
lived in an age of books and newspapers. Printing was known and
practiced long before his time, but never in the world’s history
has the press groaned beneath its burden of publications as it
has during his life-time. The newspaper has been born in this
country—not in the sense of being created out of nothing, but
in the sense of being transformed and unfolded into new being.
It existed before, but it was only a grub then. It has taken on
wings since, and is a different thing altogether. Had the great
fire in Chicago occurred a hundred years ago, the city would
have been rebuilt before news of its destruction had reached the
more remote sections of the country. Now, men see in the morning
newspaper, before they get to business, the world’s photograph as
it looked at sunset last night. These wonderful facilities for
intercommunication have quickened thought, have aroused energy,
have stimulated activity. Every thing goes by express now;
haste! is the watchword of this age. In an old colonial paper
published in Connecticut there is a notice to this effect: “The
vessel which was to have sailed from New London for England on
next Wednesday will postpone her departure for two weeks longer
on account of one of the passengers not being able to get ready
before.” Now, if he is two minutes late the plank is drawn, and
he is left behind.

If we would measure Father Boehm’s life-time aright we must not
forget that he has lived for a century in an age when men talk
by lightning, travel by steam, write with a printing-press, and
move by the second. He has lived through the best hundred years
this world ever saw; he has lived more than the man who was
contemporary with both Adam and Noah; there is more of history
and religion crystallized in his memory than could have entered
into any one experience in any age before. The length of that
life is wonderful—but its breadth amazes and overwhelms me!

But it is not so much Father Boehm’s extreme age, nor yet his
wide and varied experience, which calls forth our homage to-day.
Old age is honorable, and I always take off my hat before gray
hairs. I am no advocate for relic worship; and yet there is
something in a moss-covered building, in an old mildewed book, or
in the ruins of an ancient city, which irresistibly calls forth
my veneration. I cannot help uncovering my head and walking with
muffled footsteps in the presence of hoary antiquity. By just
as much more as a man is greater and better than a book or a
building, do I venerate the face seamed and scarred, and the head
bleached white with many years. But I have seen older men than
Father Boehm. It was my privilege not long ago to see a man die,
and afterward to bury him, who was two years the senior of the
patriarch of this occasion. There are centenarians to-day living
in almost every State in the Union, the return of whose birthday
calls forth no such public expression of affection and honor.
Father Boehm’s age would command our respect if he had no other
claim upon our attention; but that alone had never called this
concourse of people together from so many and such distant places.

We cannot help paying deference to knowledge, no matter whether
it be acquired through books or experience, or both together.
Knowledge is power, and it is a power which makes itself
respected every-where. The man who stands before us as a kind of
mental reservoir, into which the experiences, observations, and
studies of a hundred years have poured their ceaseless streams,
is king by virtue of his knowledge; he wears a crown which none
will dispute, and holds a scepter before which all will bow. We
look upon Father Boehm as an incarnate, living volume of history;
his life is a cyclopedia of one nineteenth of the Christian era;
he is the embodiment of all the precious memories of Methodism.
We value, cherish, and honor him for his ripe experience and
well-stored mind. But not for his age and wisdom alone, nor
chiefly for these, do the Church and community value his life
and treasure his memory. Goodness is better than age—is better
than knowledge. It is the sunshine which gilds the mountain of
years, and which ripens into sweetness the fruits of experience
which grow on the sides of that mountain. The Church has sent
her representatives here to-day to emphasize the proverb that
“the hoary head is a crown of glory, if it be found in the way of
righteousness.”

We forget every thing else while we remember vividly that Father
Boehm, though a hundred years old, has a moral character upon
which suspicion has never dared to breathe, and that beneath that
wrinkled face the religion of Jesus dwells in all the sweetness,
freshness, innocence, and simplicity of early childhood. We
have come together to-day to offer thanksgiving to God, and
congratulations to each other, for this life of a hundred years
without one spot or stain. His moral and religious life stands
out upon his Christian profession like a white lily upon a field
of snow. My hand shall not attempt to paint so pure a picture.
“To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, and throw perfume over
the violet, or seek with taper light the beauteous eye of heaven
to garnish, were wasteful and ridiculous excess.” Were this whole
world at Father Boehm’s disposal, with its wealth and its wisdom,
he could not from all its stores bestow a richer dowry upon the
Church of his love than the record of his own simple, humble,
true and untarnished life.

Rev. George Lansing Taylor read the following original hexameter ode, composed by him for Father Boehm’s centennial. Before reading the poem he said, in a good-humored way:—

“I ought to make a remark for the benefit of the least bookish
of my hearers, and I will do it in the form of a story. I have
heard the anecdote of a young lady fresh from boarding school,
who, in a conversation on the subject of poetry, sagely remarked
that Shakspeare was not poetry, because it did not rhyme. For
the benefit of some members of the same family as that young
lady who may yet be living I would insist that the world still
continues to call Shakspeare poetry in spite of the absence of
rhyme; and if my hearers will listen attentively to catch the
swing of the long hexameter line they may find rhythm in what I
have to read to them, if not rhyme.”

THE HEROIC AGE.

AN HEXAMETER ODE.

BY REV. GEORGE LANSING TAYLOR, M.A.

HENRY BOEHM, 1775-1875.

_Exegi monumentum ære perennius._—_Horace, Odes III, 80, 1._

Where are our hero fathers; the prophets, do they live forever?—
Where are the spirits and forms sublime in the ages departed,
Forms that loom now, gigantic, as men seen through mists on the
hill-tops,
Loom through the vista of years, majestic as gods in their stature,
Towering above us in labors that shame our puny endeavors,
Mighty in godlike virtues, in sufferings like to the martyrs,
Like them in poverty, hardship, loneliness, exile, and anguish;
Like them in fortitude, valiant as knights in the ages heroic;
Lofty and ardent of soul as Godfrey, or Bertrand, or Bayard:
Glorying in toils apostolic, in matchless intent and achievement;
Flaming with ardor seraphic, and scorning earth’s honors for heaven’s,
Such were our hero fathers and founders, the Methodist preachers.

Honor, all honor to-day to the men, and their labors and triumphs,
Labors that shaped a new world, and triumphs that echoed through heaven.
Rude was the wild they traversed, a continent virgin and pathless,
Peopled by bold, strong races, and States new-rising from darkness;
An unformed chaos of men from the ends of the earth flung together,
Cast on this shore untrodden like drift cast up by the sea-surf.
Men of all lands, all tongues, all ranks, all creeds and opinions,
Mingled as quartz and feldspar and hornblende are mingled in granite;
Mingled by fiery fusion to make the bed-rock of a nation.
Fierce were the forces that fought in the furnace where freedom was
molded.
Tyranny kindled the flame, but Liberty fann’d it and fed it;
Fed it with fire from the skies, and fuel of hearts self-devoted,
Till the rude mass, undigested, refractory, stubborn, chaotic,
Blended at last in a Union of hearts and of States in firm compact,
Welded in blood and fire, cemented for ages of ages.

Not alone valor heroic, or Liberty’s warm aspirations,
Not alone wisdom and state-craft, secured and cemented that union.
Lo! from the throne of Jehovah, and borne by the children of Wesley,
Came a new message divine to the dying faith of the people.
Not in the outworn phrases of long-dead creeds and confessions,
Not in the garb sacerdotal, with lifeless liturgical echoes,
Not in an unknown tongue, with a wafer Christ, or his image,
Came as an angel of light the new evangel of freedom.
Free grace alike upon all, and freedom in all to receive it,
Pardon of sin, and its witness inborn in the souls of God’s children,
Full salvation on earth, and fitness for death and for heaven:
Such was the glad new song the new evangel was singing;
Such was the message from God that wrought, while the forge-fires of
freedom
Glowed, and the hammers of war fell fast, as on iron at welding—
Wrought, like the flux on the iron, that purifies, softens, dissolves
it,
Melting the parts into one, as the stroke of the hammer unites them.
So did the glad outpouring of grace blend the hearts of the people,
Crying, “What God hath joined let not man’s strifes put asunder!”

So wrought the mighty revival, and mighty men wrought in its labors,
Giants on earth in those days, and men of renown in the old-time,
Deathless their memory still, and deathless their toils and their
triumphs.
Where is that conquering host, that thundering legion of heroes,
Men girt with lightnings celestial, and each one a match for a thousand;—
Turning the world upside down, and storming the gates of perdition—
Where are they now, with their preaching, their praying, and singing
seraphic?
Gone! all gone from the earth, swept on like an angel procession,
Bursting awhile on men’s eyes, entrancing the earth with their splendor,
Then, through the white-cloud screen, melting into the glory eternal.
So passeth one generation away, pursued by another,
Fading like leaves with the years, while the earth abideth forever.

Gone! but not all; for lo! one lingers yet living among us,
One of that dauntless host that of old shook the earth with their
thunder.
Hail to the snow-crowned veteran, comrade and partner with heroes!
Hail to the patriarch hoary, survivor of thousands and millions!
Hail to the oak that has stood while the forest was crashing around it,
Stood, and still stands, on the mountain whereerst as a sapling it
flourished,
Grappling the rocks with its roots and with gnarled arms baffling the
tempests,
Gray with a century’s mosses that stream like the beard of a druid,
Ghostly and bare at the top, green below, and sound to the heart-core!
Hail to the hero revered, whose long years stretch on, and still onward,
Passing the threescore and ten, the limit appointed to mortals,
Passing the frosty fourscore, in vigor erect and unbroken,
Shod as with iron and brass, and marching with tramp adamantine
On through the deserts of life, where the bones of youth’s caravans
whiten,
On to the century’s end, to the year that begins a new hundred!
Battled-scarred, time-scarred, and sere, like a storm-beaten crag,
thunder-rifted,
Still in our midst stands the hero, like Nestor of old, sung by Homer;
Nestor, the Pylian sage, who had ruled over three generations:
So stands Boehm, the revered, to-day ’mid the children of Wesley,
Children and children’s children of dead generations who loved him,
Heard from his lips the glad tidings, believed, and passed shouting to
glory!
Heard him who stands here to-day, last link of the ages departed!

Backward, roll backward, ye years that have drifted like autumn leaves
o’er him,
Bear him in mem’ry once more to the home and the scenes of his childhood.
Bear him once more to the farm of his sires in dear old Conestoga,
Nigh where the broad Susquehanna rolls on to the bay and the ocean,
Bid Pennsylvania’s mountains lift up their blue ridges around him,
Laurel Hill, Blue Ridge, Blue Mountains, stern warders of virtue and
freedom,
Bid the far-known and far-honored old homestead fling wide its broad
portal,
Once more to welcome the feet that have journeyed so oft to that
threshold.
Rise from the dust where ye slumber, ye forms that of yore thronged that
mansion,
Join the bright circle, long broken, and move once more, living, before
us!

Hail, Martin Boehm, sire and sage evangelist, bishop, and farmer,
Honored in each and by all, a prince among men stamped by nature.
Born of the strong, patient race of the Alps and the old Palatinate;—
Calvinist, Pietist, Mennonite, Methodist last and completest;—
Friend and copartner with Otterbein, Asbury’s helper and brother,
Such was the patriarch sire of that home by the broad Susquehanna.

Oft there illustrious Asbury rested from toils superhuman,
Worn with the long, long march that yearly encircled a continent,
Worn yet flaming with zeal apostolic, with love archangelic,
Faith that grasped a new world, and the ardor celestial that won it.
There was his heart’s best home. There oft great Otterbein halted,
Scholar, apostle, and saint, by Asbury loved as a brother;
Sage in counsel, and mighty in prayer as Elijah on Carmel;
Founder and head of a people, a godly, fraternal communion.

Hail, Boehm’s Chapel! the temple of limestone, strong and enduring.
Sprung from the preaching of Strawbridge, the thundergust sermons of
Abbott;
Planned by the hallowing hand of Whatcoat, the humble and holy;
Still stands the relic of years and heroes departed forever!
Where are the trumpet-like voices that pealed there the sound of
salvation;
Asbury, Otterbein, Boehm, and Goeting, Ware, Colbert, and Chandler,
Garrettson, Lee, and M’Kendree, and he who still living, there heard
them;
Heard in his youth and believed, and joined the great host of the
preachers.
There, too, rose Jewell and Miller, with Sneath, and the Mitchells and
Hunters.
There rose the Burches, and Best and Aiken, names honored and cherished.
There sleep the forms of the fallen, whose spirits soared thence to
their crowning.

Lo! youthful Henry, called forth by the Church and the Lord of the
harvest—
Called to proclaim the great message, sublimest announcement to mortals—
Speeds on his life-long way, as a herald of mercy to thousands,
Speeds with his mother’s sweet kiss, and his patriarch sire’s
benediction.
Down on the old Eastern shore ’twixt the broad Chesapeake and the ocean,
Where the Peninsula’s sands and the dark cypress swamps spread around
him;
Where the strange tongue of the red man still haunts all the lands and
the waters;
Where blind bigotry’s rage in its rudeness had buffeted angels;
There, in the year eighteen hundred, in Dorchester County and Circuit,
Rang forth a voice like John’s in the wilderness preaching repentance.
Not as one beating the air, in an empty pulpit-gymnastic,
Cried the young herald his message ’mid struggles and sorrows of spirit.
Hundreds, awaked at the story, repented in anguish and mourning.
Hundreds in new-found mercy exulted, and shouted salvation.
Bloomed then the desert, a garden, the dark cypress swamps, like
cathedrals,
Rang with the praise of the Lord till ocean in thunder responded,
Hail the Peninsula! cradle and birthplace of prophets and heroes!
Bostwick, and Bayer, and Beauchamp, M’Combs, and Cooper, and Phœbus,
Martindale, silver-tongued Hull, sage Lawrenson, Emory gifted,
Leaders of Israel’s hosts, and wise master-builders in Zion.

Up, thence, to old Annamessex, to Kent, and Northampton, and Bristol,
Up from the sands to the mountains, from youth to the glory of manhood,
Pressed the evangelist onward, proclaiming free grace and salvation.
Mighty the word in those days, and mighty the Spirit’s outpourings,
Falling on camp-meeting, conference, prophets and people together;
Falling like pentecost whirlwinds on awe-struck thousands assembled;
Sweeping from circuit to circuit till States were ablaze with its glory!
So o’er the prairie in autumn the fire-ocean dashes its surges;
So over pine-clad mountains roars onward the vast conflagration!

Lo, through the length of the land, from Maine to the Gulf, in his
circuits,
Asbury moves like a flame, with Boehm his companion and helper.
Not as a servant but friend, a counselor, brother, he journeyed,
True as Achates renowned, who of old voyaged with pious Æneas,
Loyal as valiant Patroclus, beloved by the godlike Achilles.
Onward from circuit to circuit, from city to city, unresting,
Toiled the great founder and builder, the care of the Churches upon him.
On through the rich cultured East, the bright sunny South, and the
center,
O’er Alleghanian wilds, Tennessee, rough Kentucky, Ohio;
Rivers unbridged, and mountains untraversed, the home of the panther;
Plunging through forest and flood, nor halting for frost or for freshet;
Heeding nor terror nor tempest, all climates and seasons defying,
On, as by heaven’s inspiration, the tramp of their marching resounded.

What was the strong lure that drew them with force unresisted, undying,
Stronger than sorrow or pain? Did golden dreams glitter before them?
Empire? or honors? or fame, whose trump thrills the world with its
echoes?
Nay! None, nor all, of all these; but a mightier spell, and diviner,
Bore them on wing and aflame, as it bore the rapt seraphs from glory,
Warbling o’er Bethlehem’s slumbers the gush of a rapture immortal!
Souls, souls of men, of the poor, the friendless, the erring, the
outcast.
These were their hire and their treasure, as erst of the Master who
taught them.
These, won from death, their reward, and the joy of all heaven beholding;
These were their sheaves, which the Lord of the harvest with blessing
accepted.

Still grows the toil of that harvest, and still swells the joy of its
reaping,
Reaped and resown evermore in endless perennial springing;
Sown like a handful of corn, but waving like Lebanon’s glory:—
Sown with weeping, but reaped ’mid anthems of rapture angelic,
While this hoar harvester leans on his staff, and beholds, and rejoices.
Lo! from the rock-bound shores of the East to the vast Mississippi,
On over river, and prairie, and mountain, and desert, and snow range,
Rolls in grandeur the march of a mighty and marvelous empire.
Hark! In its van, and before it, through solitudes ancient and boundless,
Blown by a thousand heralds, the trump of the new-born evangel
Wakens the wilds where nations extinct have pined for the dawning;
Dawning of morn everlasting, the sunburst for oncoming millions!

On over earth, as it rolls, in the golden sheen of the sunlight,
Swells now the glad new song, the harmonious anthem celestial.
Where the winged caravan, harnessed with fire and thunder, is flying;
Where, at the magic of commerce, old ocean shrinks to a ferry;
Where thought whispers with lightning, and belts the globe in a
heart-beat;
Where strange tongues babble on through continents old, or untraversed;
Where, round the sea-girdled islands, the waves dash music eternal;
Where o’er all earth man wanders, sorrowing, sinning, immortal—
There shines Columbia’s glory, and their lies the parish of Wesley;
There the great harvests of freedom and God wait the sower and reaper.

Lo, now, the harvester, bowed with the fierce, long heat of the noonday,
Weary with wielding the sickle, and bent with the sheaves he has
gathered,
Walks through the low slant beams of the sunset, and toils tow’rd the
garner.
Four times the distance that circles this planet those footsteps have
measured,
Through a long century’s day, but the twilight at last is descending.
Shadows of sunset have faded. Through vistas of opal and amber,
Gates beyond gates open upward, of hyacinth, sardine, and jasper,
Softly unbarred, to the inmost, the gate of one pearl, like a rose-bud
Cleft through the core, and turned outward on hinges of gold! Lo,
unfolding,
Noiseless it swings, like a curtain, and rosy wings poise and sail
earthward,
Rosy hands reach toward the harvester, tenderly lifting his burden,
Tenderly lifting his feet till they thrill on threshold of glory,
Till the bent form blooms and glows, and the white head dazzles like
Hermon’s,
Crowned with his sun-smitten snows,—as this with the throne-flash
eternal!
Harvester, Farewell! from earth—and Hail! from the elders of heaven!

Rev. Cyrus D. Foss, D.D., then responded to the request for some remarks.

ADDRESS BY REV. DR. FOSS.

One of the most distinguished advocates in this country is said
to have remarked concerning the almost interminable speech of
the counsel on the other side: “My learned friend seems to have
feared that it would be impossible for him to make his speech
immortal without making it eternal.” Now I am very sure that
this meeting is in no such peril as that. Each particular part
of these proceedings has been quite too short for its abundant
merit, and the meeting itself will be all too short to enable us
to utter the feeling of all our hearts. But we may be sure that
the memory of this meeting will last, and that three quarters of
a century hence—and it may be even farther off than that—when
there shall be fifteen millions of Methodist communicants on
this continent by the blessing of God, this meeting may be
remembered by some of the youth here to-day, and it will go down
in permanent form in the Methodist records. I will not extend
the time of the meeting long, lest I should impose upon your
patience; I will not occupy half the number of minutes that the
chairman of the committee has requested me to speak.

We have been very eloquently told how grandly full of history
this last century has been, and how much more this honored
life, which in its earthly form shall soon pass away, contains
than the life of any man who has lived in any century before
this. I recall the sentiment of Bishop Kingsley, who was asked
early in the history of our civil war how old he was, and he
promptly answered, “One hundred and forty-six.” “Why,” said his
questioner, “how do you make that out?” “Well,” he replied, “I
was forty-six years old when the war began, and I have lived a
hundred years since.” Now reckoning upon that principle, which is
the just one, our venerable Father Boehm might well claim to be
a thousand years of age to-day. You have heard in the eloquent
address of our brother from Philadelphia some account of the
wonderful progress we have made within the last century. He did
not tell you what I will add, namely, that since this godly man
began to preach the Gospel there have been ten times as many
copies of the word of God put into circulation as were circulated
before in all the centuries since Moses wrote the Pentateuch; and
that within the same space of time there has been a great deal
more done in extending the Gospel into the regions beyond, in
obedience to that inspiring “Go!” which the Lord Jesus put at the
back of his apostles before he ascended into heaven, than in all
the other ages before. What a century that makes of the one in
which we live! Of this work, by the blessing of God, our honored
guest is no small part: and more, that sublime temple, in which
he stands so tall and strong a column, the temple of Methodism,
is no small part.

My dear friends, I stand here not to attempt what now would
be impossible—any thing further in the line of the touching,
delicate, and eloquent personalities which have been so fitly
spoken here to-day, and which have thrilled our hearts with
delight. I cannot pluck another flower from anywhere to adorn
the wreath that these brethren have woven for this godly man. I
will say a few words concerning that grand system of religious
revival and propagandism which he helped to build when it was
weak, and which gathers us here to-day. And what is it—this great
religious system, so mighty for the world’s evangelization, by
God’s blessing? If I had an hour to speak here on this occasion,
I would say that the secret of the wonderful success of Methodism
is to be sought, in part, in its doctrinal system, in part in
its ecclesiastical peculiarities, and still more largely in its
religious experience.

Concerning the first of these points, I could not summarize
our doctrinal teachings, speaking in this impromptu way, half
so well as they have just been stated in the poem. Of course
our fathers adhered to all the great truths which the Church
had held through all time, but they lopped away some of the
errors, and were commissioned by God not to add any new truth,
(for the truth was perfect when the canon of Scripture was
closed,) but to re-emphasize some of the old and forgotten
verities; and so when they went forth into regions in England
and America where the dry rot of religious thinking, which men
call theology, had misled the minds of the people and had dulled
their sensibilities—when they went forth preaching to all men
that they were really in peril of eternal death, and that there
was offered to them in the Gospel, by their lips, _salvation_—a
present salvation, a conscious salvation, a full salvation—no
wonder they found a hearing. That was the proclamation that these
men every-where made; and these important truths, hidden in the
creeds before, or at least not brought out, held up as flaming
torches before the faces of men, needed only to be so presented
to light up the dull eye and warm the frozen heart of the world.

Not only in the emphasis which they laid on these truths did our
fathers do a grand work for the world. We had also important
ecclesiastical peculiarities. The first of these that arrested
the attention of men seventy-five years ago in America, and one
hundred and twenty-five years ago in England, was our itinerant
ministry. The preacher did not stand still in one place and wait
for the people to come to him, but went to them with the offer
of the Gospel of the Son of God, because he felt within him the
pressure of that almighty “Go!” of the Lord Jesus Christ, which
impelled him on to preach the word with power. After a man’s
attention had been arrested by Methodism, the next thing was to
invite him to the class-meeting. The preacher, seeing the tears
streaming down his face, and going to him after the sermon, would
ask him—not “Do you believe the Thirty-nine Articles?” nor “Are
you willing to be damned for the glory of God?”—but he would
simply say, “Do you desire to flee from the wrath to come, and to
be saved from your sins?” and if he said “Yes,” he would be told,
“Here is Brother Jones, a class leader, go to his class next
Thursday night.” The people also found that a man who wielded
the hammer on the anvil from Monday to Saturday went forth on
Sunday and preached the Gospel. So there was a lay ministry, and
that was another peculiarity of the ecclesiastical polity of our
Church. Concerning these and all the rest I will simply say, that
the grand peculiarity of all was, that it was not a man-made
system, devised in the brain of John Wesley or any body else,
but simply a leading forth, under the providence of God, and by
the hand of God, of godly men to bless and save the world. There
is not a single peculiarity of Methodism that was not a child of
Providence. John Wesley never intended one of them. So we are
followers of Wesley when we follow God. To him who would follow
the path in which John Wesley trod, if Wesley were alive to-day
he would say, “God is our leader, follow him.” And yet in doing
this I am persuaded that we should wisely heed the sentiments of
that eloquent utterance of Bishop Asbury in the letter that has
just now been read to us. Let us hope, and pray, and beseech,
clinging to the very horns of the altar, that every change made
in the policy of this grandly successful Church may be manifestly
“made by God and not by men, who have long been trying to be
their own bishops.”

After all, as it seems to me, the greatest thing in Methodism,
from the beginning until now, has been its religious experience.
Why, my dear sir, God’s way of making any great truth effective
is not by writing it in the Bible, but on the fleshly tables of
men’s hearts. There is not a single one of those old verities
which are vital to our faith but has been in the world, but has
been in the Book, for almost nineteen centuries; and yet the Dark
Ages passed over the world for all that. Pardon of sin, salvation
through faith alone, was already within the Book of God; but the
people did not heed it until God put it in the heart of Martin
Luther, and when he told it the world believed him, and hence the
Reformation.

And so in the time of the Wesleys, and in the time of their
followers in England and America, the power of God was made
manifest through their experience. It was not simply the
ecclesiastical peculiarities that they held to, it was not simply
the doctrines they taught; it was those doctrines set on fire in
their hearts that made people learn the lesson, and that alone.

My dear friends, there is not a single truth of Christianity
which has not been in some age of the world buried, and buried
out of sight; and every such truth, when exhumed, has been
exhumed in this way: God has taken it and put it into the living
soul of a living man, and it has possessed him, and then he has
gone forth and declared it, and men have believed him. Look at
the old truth of the universality of the offer of the Gospel. The
great commission should have taught this to the Apostle Peter.
But long after that you find him hiding away from the Gentiles,
not holding to their company, until God set him right at last
by a vision from heaven, and he came forth and said what one
would have thought his personal experience with Jesus should
have taught him long before:—Peter came forth and declared, as
though he had found something new, “I perceive that God is no
respecter of persons.” And away down the ages, until a century
ago, the Church was possessed by the same Jewish bigotry. It is
within the life-time not only of our venerable patriarch, but of
others here to-day, that at a meeting of ministers the question,
“Will any young minister suggest to us a subject for discussion?”
was asked, and up rose William Carey and said: “Mr. Chairman, I
suggest for discussion this theme, ‘The duty of the Christian
Church to evangelize the heathen world,’” and the old gray-haired
moderator, Dr. Ryland, said: “Sit down, young man, sit down; when
God gets ready to convert the heathen he will do it without your
help or mine.” But the great truth was hidden in the hearts of
William Carey, Adoniram Judson, and Thomas Coke, and they went
forth and proclaimed it, and the world is beginning to believe it.

So with the knowledge of sins forgiven; by the witness of the
Spirit Methodism has done much to make this precious experience
the common heritage of the Evangelical Church of to-day. A
century and a half ago I doubt if there were ten men in all
England who dared to say they believed that doctrine. When
Benjamin Abbott was past thirty years of age, he had never heard
a man say he knew his sins forgiven; and when he proclaimed it
as his experience a deacon told him it was a dangerous heresy,
and every man who held it ought to be put to death. And that
within this century! But, my dear friends, after fifteen years of
such service of God as few men have ever rendered—after fifteen
years of such apostolic zeal for the relief of the poor, and
the religious instruction of prisoners, and the bringing to
morality and decency of the lowest of the sinful, as few men have
ever passed through—a young man of Lincoln College, Oxford, at
the age of thirty-three or thirty-four, hearing a Moravian read
from one of Luther’s Commentaries about justification by faith
alone, says that in that meeting, about half past eight o’clock
in the evening, his heart was “strangely warmed;” and then
Methodism was born. If it had not been for that strange warming
of John Wesley’s heart we would not be here to-day. It was the
vitalization, in the experience of the Methodists, of the old,
forgotten doctrine that made them mighty, and sent forth this
“great religious movement,” as Stevens so well calls it, “of the
eighteenth century.”

I must not multiply words, sir. It is my prayer that in all the
changes of our Church polity we may “make haste slowly;” that in
all matters of Christian doctrine we may follow the word of God,
and may have the truth interpreted to us as it was to Wesley, by
the illuminating light of the Spirit, and that the great power
of Methodism may ever be the power of its scriptural, personal,
joyous experience.

Rev. David W. Bartine, D.D., delivered the closing address.

DR. BARTINE’S ADDRESS.

I feel weary at this moment with the journeyings of a hundred
years—with the reasonings, the preaching, and the toil of a
hundred years. And I presume that this congregation is weary
too—weary for once with perfect delight in the enjoyment of
an entertainment that we shall never forget, with a pleasure
that will thrill our hearts till our feet touch the cold waters
of Jordan. I am one of Father Boehm’s boys, and I delight in
the privilege afforded me to-day, at the closing moments of
these profoundly interesting services, to say so. When I was a
little babe, (of course I don’t remember the circumstance, but
my friends remember it,) Father Boehm, in company with Bishop
Asbury, came to my father’s house. (My father, you know, was one
of the old pioneers, a plain, grand old man, a hero through and
through, who met the heresies to which my brother referred awhile
ago and helped to conquer them.) Well, they came to my father’s
house, and the bishop baptized me, as Father Boehm remembers
and has often told me; and that put me in the succession, and I
am as perfectly in the apostolic succession to-day as any man
in America or in the world—not simply because the old bishop
baptized me, but, my friends, afterward God converted me in the
old-fashioned Methodist style. I learned the great principles of
this wondrous Church in the company of such learned men as these,
(pointing to Father Boehm,) sitting at their feet, listening to
their words, and being taught in the schools of which they were
the prophets. And I glory to-day that I feel like clinging to the
good old-fashioned Methodist style.

In the year 1832, when I was a boy—and I suppose as we sometimes
say, in cant phrase, somewhat “green”—I received a message from
this venerable father inviting me to attend a camp-meeting; and
those meetings were real camp-meetings; the people went there
to pray all the time, and to look for the baptism of the Holy
Ghost. I went, trembling, fearing, feeling utterly disqualified
for the work I had entered on, and which I believe God called me
to undertake; and I shall never forget the kindly greeting this
precious father gave me as I entered those grounds. He took all
the fear from my heart, and greeted me with a cordiality I have
never forgotten; he said a few kindly, loving, simple words, that
strengthened my heart through and through, and from that day to
this I have been blessed and honored with the friendship of this
venerable man of God.

If I had time to-day I should like to give a number of
reminiscences which I could present, but the time has passed
so rapidly that the close of these interesting services is
necessarily near at hand. And before we separate this afternoon
let us congratulate ourselves that we still have preserved among
us such a grand specimen of the Methodism of the olden time. Dr.
Foss presented us with some very interesting thoughts upon this
subject, and that is one of the points I intended to present. But
every one who has spoken to-day has stolen some of my thunders,
so that I am compelled to manufacture thunder as I go along; and
I find that its manufacture is not so easy a matter when others
have used your material so freely as have these brethren who
preceded me to-day.

But let me say to you, my friends, that we are not to treat
lightly an example such as we find in this venerable man.
Concentrated in him is Methodism in its simplest form, in its
purest characteristics—Methodism as I pray God it may go down to
the ages of the future. And I want it to be distinctly understood
that I am not a believer in this modern idea that we are going
easily to improve the system of Methodism which this venerable
man helped to found. It may be tampered with, its success might
be interfered with; but it is not a very easy thing to mend it. I
am willing to be led, as my fathers were, where God shall lead;
but I want to see the footprints of God where I put my feet,
I want to see divine providence indicating the way in all the
wondrous march of this form of Christianity.

There is one thing most assuredly a fact, and that is, that our
system of itinerancy cannot well be improved. I do not know what
Bishop Asbury would say to-day upon this interesting subject:
whether it is the true philosophy to so change our ministerial
arrangements as to continue a man in one or two appointments
during a life-time, and still call it an itinerancy. I want to
say, that though I would not be an “old fogy,” you will find it
a hard thing to improve in this direction that system which has
shaken the world. And the question with me is, whether, with
all the improvement that is claimed for it, it is shaking the
world to-day as it shook it when this venerable father, with
heroic purpose and earnest voice, led on his combined forces
on his grand old districts? The world did shake then; hell did
shake then; the powers of unbelief and heresy did shake then,
as the hosts of God marched on from battle to battle, and from
victory to victory. A great many well-polished shafts were then
hurled by these men of bluntest speech, with both force and
effect, at the heart of the foe; and it is a question worthy of
consideration whether, after all our advancement in learning and
literature, and every thing of that sort—after all our boasted
improvement—there is that real, old, divine unction that shook
the dead Churches, and awakened the sleeping multitudes to a
realization of their need of the saving grace of our Lord Jesus
Christ?