In South Carolina. 597 



ministry, who, under God and the Church, are responsible for the 

 exercise of discipline. And although they never expelled a mem- 

 ber that I know of altogether by the preacher, yet it was the uni- 

 form practice of the Church for twenty-five years after my connection 

 with it to have the offender against any of its laws immediately 

 brought to trial. This was right. If a member is accused of having 

 a walk and spirit contrary to the word of God, and the Church 

 determines this to be the case, and he refuses to amend, turn him 

 out. God says that whenever we separate the precious from the 

 •vile we are as God's mouth. What does this mean but to teach us 

 that the Church is a pure spiritual body — the kingdom over which 

 we are made guardians and governors. Hence the Saviour delivered 

 to Peter the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and said to him, 

 " Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, 

 and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." 

 Not that God intended to indorse all that the Church might do, but 

 that the Church should do just what God had told it to do, and then 

 it was indorsed all the time. But the fact is that we have gone on 

 in a loose way until the Church is brought within the influence of 

 the miserable idea of an ecclesiastical democracy. Brethren be- 

 loved, forgive me, for I know that I am right. The Methodists 

 throughout the country are greatly at fault because they do not have 

 a more rigid, righteous discipline exercised in the Churches. The 

 Church will never reinstate this discipline simply as a Church. 

 The reformation must begin in the hands of the ministry, in the 

 Annual and the General Conferences. In all the first half of my 

 ministry throughout the country there was not an exception known 

 to me, unless there was a most valid excuse, of any one belonging 

 to the Church as an acceptable member, and neglecting a weekly 

 class-meeting. Ninety-eight out of every hundred in the South 

 Carolina Conference throughout my early ministry were present at 

 every class-meeting, unless absent on business or sick. Now seventv- 

 five out of every hundred never go to class-meeting at all, have not 

 been in one for many years. And in some places it is more than 

 that. In the giving way of the Church, and in the refusal to keep 

 things up to the old Wesleyan scriptural standard — I know this to be 

 a fact — there is now and has been for a long time in the Methodist 

 Church too great an attendance upon the frivolities of life, and too 

 little attendance to prayer and class-meeting. Still it is allowed to 

 go on. That you may not think me extreme in my advocacy of 

 plainness in dress, I will state that many have thought for a long 



