ART. III.-THE CONFERENCE COURSE OF STUDY

THE Conference course of study is a vastly more important thing than many people have ever imagined. There are abundant proofs that it has been underestimated and misunderstood in many quarters. To many Conferences it has been a requirement or a test of "gifts" that might be practically ignored and completely set aside by a popular vote, if a candidate had made a dash at it, had had something of a revival during the year, and had been represented by his presiding elder as a "good fellow, who would always go where he was sent and do a very important work on our weaker charges." To many of our young men-from whom something better might be expected-it has been a disagreeable impediment that had to be gotten out of the way, and, hence, must receive attention in a slipshod sort of way for two or three weeks of unprofitable "cramming" just before Conference. Some examiners, even, have discharged their duty in a most perfunctory manner, as if the whole thing were an unnecessary bore from which they were more than glad to aid their students to escape. This is all a great mistake, damaging to character, destructive to manhood, and enervating to spiritual life. Such Conferences, students, and examiners have not begun to comprehend the meaning of the Conference course of study.

Before one is qualified to discuss intelligently the matter under consideration, pass judgment on the course of study, or come to a sane conclusion as to how it should be administered, he must have come to a clear vision of the purpose to be served and the goal to be reached. What was the Conference course of study intended to accomplish? Looking at the matter from a negative viewpoint we shall find that, primarily, it was not arranged to give the student the broad survey of literature that a preacher ought to have, and must have in these days of popular education, enlightenment, and culture; nor to secure the full-orbed mental discipline and that peculiar sano cultu which one may hope to gain at college, where he is associated with picked students and men of vast learning,

while he breathes the atmosphere of an intense and lofty intellectuality, and devotes his entire time to those studies that tend most surely to broaden the mind, train the judgment, give birth to the scientific spirit, and secure well-balanced discipline to all faculties; nor to cover, in any broad and satisfactory way, the fields of psychology, philosophy, science, sociology, history, or even of theology and biblical criticism. All must admit that the aim of the course is not to make scholars, hardly to start men in that direction. To the men who fancy that the object is to be found along these lines the course has seemed to be ridiculously weak, markedly inadequate, strongly and fatally one-sided, and selected about as unwisely as it well could be. A study of the case from a positive viewpoint, however, leads to the conclusion that the Conference course of study has been planned, selected, and carried on for the supreme purpose, primarily, of helping to make loyal, efficient, successful Methodist preachers. The course may result in many other things, but this is its supreme purpose. It aims to make it certain that the young men who come to take their places in our ranks shall know what Methodist doctrine is, according to the standards selected by our chief pastors; that they shall feel the pulse of its world-conquering polity and be set on fire with the zeal, self-sacrifice, and enthusiasm that have made our church a mighty, victorious power in that past of which we have a right to be proud. It is not so much that the candidate is to get a smattering of biblical criticism, that he is to take a plunge into the chilling waters of philosophy, that he is to be guided over the borders into the delightful fields of literature, that he is to secure a tantalizing glimpse of some of the great events and the immense problems of history; it is that he may breathe the atmosphere, know the men, imbibe the spirit, and, above all, get the visions that will inspire and help him to become the best possible sort of a Methodist preacher to the age in which he lives. If a man is to be a marked success in any realm he must be en rapport with the spirit of the movement that he is to try to help along; and, since Methodism has a peculiar and distinguishing spirit, it is certain that a man may have much that is most desirable and yet fail here.

Before a man can become a good Methodist preacher he must have a vision of, and be captivated by, the gospel of a fair chance for every man. He must see that Jesus Christ died for every man in the same sense that he died for any man. He must know that there is a power adequate for salvation in spite of the weight of heredity, environment, and every soul-crushing influence that has smitten the weakest and the worst. He must have a great vision of Jesus Christ as the Friend and Saviour of the suffering and thesinning everywhere. He must have expericficed the new birth of an all-mastering desire to lift up degraded and wreeked humanity. He must have obtained, somehow, something like an adequate conception of the value of lost souls, and be able to see the world through the eyes of his Master. He must have faced the truth that the church which rejects the poor will be rejected of the great Christ, who when he lived among the sons of men had not where to lay his head. He must be thrilled with the ideal that the end of the gospel of the risen Son of God is the perfection not only of love but of character. No man can be a good Methodist preacherif he can be a good preacher of any kind-till he has been led to his Gethsemane and Calvary. He must have learned to put Christ and his cause above all selfishness and self-seeking. He must have come to know what Jesus meant when he said, "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me." He must learn that every man is a traitor to the Methodist ministry who does not put the interests and conquests of the kingdom above all self-seeking. The Methodist Church has conquered gloriously in the past because everywhere men have been obedient to marching orders. The spirit of Methodism is the spirit of self-sacrifice for the kingdom. This is a truth that is needed everywhere to-day. How can the preacher help men to this all-important revelation if he has himself never visited Calvary? No man is fitted to preach in a Methodist pulpit who has not had a soul-mastering vision that religion is a vital, soulsatisfying, life-transforming personal experience. Methodism was born in the hour when John Wesley felt his heart "strangely warmed." Then he knew that Jesus Christ had saved him. Then

he had experience of what Paul meant when he wrote, "The Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children of God." From that day to this the heart of Methodism has been found not primarily in its theology, for that is not peculiar; nor primarily in its polity, as happily and well adapted for the age as that has been; but in a vital experience of the "love of God shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Ghost."

The Methodist preacher, for this age specially, must have a positive gospel of hope: The world has never been helped by negatives. It is not soul-shriveling doubt, but a mighty, positive faith, that has led the vanguard of Christian civilization to the sun-kissed summits of a better life. It is not the thing one doubts, but the thing he knows, that imparts the unction and power of the prophet. Joseph Cook was not far from expressing the demands of our age when he said, "I want no dying pillow supported by anything but a rendered reason." The weary, discouraged, disheartened, anxious, dying world demands certainty. The pew is saying to the pulpit, "Tell us what you know! Is there a God who cares for me? Is there a loving, powerful personality who walks close by my side in the darkness as well as in the light? Does the man who prays get something that the man who does not pray does not get? May a lost, corrupted, degraded, sin-wrecked soul be saved and find such help as will enable him to live a new life? Is the Bible the Word of God, and can it be trusted? Is Jesus Christ more than man? Is there reason for believing that death does not end all and that we shall meet our loved and lost on the shores of a better land?" The world is ready to listen to a prophet. It cannot abide the hair-splitter. No man can be a good Methodist preacher who does not have and preach a positive gospel of love and salvation for a lost world. And, last, but far from least, no man can be an ideal, victorious Methodist preacher who is not possessed of and driven on to irresistible action by the spirit of a soul-absorbing pentecostal evangelism. Above everything else the man who stands in the pulpits of our church must be a soul-winner. He must make it his main business to get men and women, boys and girls, to Jesus Christ. I do not so much

care how it is done. I do not believe in holding on to old machinery and antiquated programmes when they are outdated. I do not believe in reaping the harvest with the old-time sickle when I can get a Deering self-binder. I do not believe in traveling from New York to Chicago in a prairie schooner drawn by oxen when I can take the Twentieth Century Limited. No more do I believe in trying to work old methods and ecclesiastical machinery of any sort that will not work to-day, simply because they worked splendidly under conditions that prevailed fifty years ago.

These are the fundamentally essential things in Methodism. If, therefore, the Conference course of study is arranged and conducted primarily to help make successful Methodist preacherswhatever else it may do or may not do-just as a Methodist theological seminary exists to help make Methodist preachers, it must help to a clear, soul-inspiring vision of these things that are absolutely necessary to the making and work of a Methodist preacher. This is the standard by which the course is to be judged and exalted or condemned. Judged by this standard the Conference course of study will be found calculated in good measure to secure the end of its being. It does lay emphasis on the things that are absolutely essential. Our books on doctrine, while not altogether satisfactory, and far from satisfactory in some respects, are fairly aglow with this gospel of a fair chance for every man. Some have thought that the course sagged with an overplus of such books as give a vision of the origin, polity, and spirit of early and victorious Methodism; but these critics have lost sight of its purpose and goal. One cannot read Stevens's History of Methodism and the Methodist Episcopal Church, John Wesley the Methodist, The Heart of Wesley's and Asbury's Journals, The Tongue of Fire, The History of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and some other books that might be named, without coming to see that the fundamentals of Methodism have so large a place in the system that one cannot be a Methodist preacher at all, in any large and true sense, if these principles have not captured his soul and are not dominating his life. He will see that Methodism is primarily a heart experience; that it has ever been loyal to the gospel of hope