A WESLEYAN NON-OFFICIAL CONFERENCE.
(To THZ EDITOR 0/ THIS "SPECTATOR.”] Si,—About a year ago, to the delight of your Wesleyan Methodist readers, and probably many others, you published a short anticipation of the Wesleyan Conference in Plymouth. The characteristic hospitality thus shown encourages this present letter. May I communicate at least one new and notable item which will mark this year's Conference in Leeds? There will be a non-official public meeting on the lines of the non-official assembly in connexion with the Church Congress at Southampton last autumn. That meeting, of its kind entirely new, made a profound impression. The representative of the Guardian described it as "the crowning-point" of the
Congress. What was its purpose ? Let me answer in the language of the Bishop of Winchester, who presided:—
" It will be a joy to many of us next Friday afternoon to be drawn together in hall and on platform, without a shadow of unfaithfulness to principle, with Christians with whom we are wholly together in the desire so to deal with the civilization of to-day as to welcome in it all that is of God's giving, and at the same time not to be seduced by its laxity or poisoned by its corruptions."
The President of the Wesleyan Conference in Leeds will be • the Rev. Dinsdale T. Young, minister at Wesley's Chapel, City Road, London. He is a master of stately and sympa- thetic speech, but he will not find, nor will he wish to find, fitter words in which to set forth the governing idea of the response meeting over which be will preside. The speakers will include the Bishop of Oxford, Principal Selbie (President of the Congregational Union of England and Wales), and the Rev. J. R. Gillies, M.A. (Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of England). The general subject will be "The Challenge of the Age to Christianity."
I must not trespass upon your space with any forecast of the ordinary business of the Wesleyan Conference. It will be the hundred-and-seventy-first similar gathering of the sons of Wesley. The blue-book is a wonder of records and reports and resolutions, the necessary and really stimulating accompaniment of a living Church charged with manifold activities. Throughout its borders there is unity and goodwilL Perhaps the proceedings will be tinctured with a touch of regret that there is a small decrease in the number of members in Great Britain. It will be a stimulus rather than a discouragement. Mr. Augustine Birrell, in his terse and delightful essay on "John Wesley," says that "one of the most typical," and "certainly the most strenuous," of eighteenth-century figures "contested the three kingdoms in the cause of Christ. .. and throughout it all he never knew what depression of spirits meant, though he had much to try him—suits in Chancery and a jealous wife." Somehow, Wesley's sons have never lost that splendid gaiety. This writer has sat through twenty-five of the latest consecutive Conferences. Their subduing, refining, and up- lifting spiritual atmosphere he will never forget. Necessarily there have been acres of talk. But two things would strike a casual visitor—how exultingly the Conference sings, and with what ecstasy it laughs.
If the least of his brethren may say so, the Rev. Dinsdale T. Young will assume the chair of the Conference at Leeds rich in the love as well as the esteem of ministers and people alike. In the matter of travel he is Wesley's true successor. Not only at the great centres of population, but in the villages of England, ever since the beginning of his ministry thirty-two years ago, he has been welcomed and applauded. In the matter, too, of evangelistic sincerity he is Wesley's successor. The non-official meeting is his comment on Wesley's saying: "The friends of all; the enemies of none."—I am, Sir, &c., 30 Cauldwell Street, Bedford. J. EDWARD HARLOW.
Previous page
