The Methodist Church The just appreciation by the whole of
the daily Press of this country of the intrinsic importance of the Methodist Union celebrations reveals an encouraging (and to the pessimistic perhaps an unexpected) sense of values. The event is, in fact, of profound importance. It is the climax of a convergent movement by which the divergences of past centuries have gradually -been obliterated, and it• marks the -final success of the efforts of patient and far- sighted men who preferred to persuade those who differed from them rather than attempt to coerce them. By those methods opposition has been gradually worn down in the last dozen years till the final decisions were taken with as near an approach to unanimity as can ever be expected in such cases. The disappearance of the name of Wesleyan, commemorating as it does the great singer no less than the great preacher of Methodism, must cause some passing regret, but there is greatness in the name of Methodism itself, so far as it denotes the ordering of life by rules deriving from a higher than human authority, and holding in subjection the unruly wills and affections of sinful men. -Dr. Scott Lidgett, as first President of the Methodist Church, is invested with the highest honour his fellow-Methodists could confer, and no living Methodist deserves it more.
