and seconded by Revs. N. C. Gowan, J. Caswell, J. Goldsmith, and Michael Aikman, Esq. The cash proceeds of this meeting were over twenty dollars.

During the several sessions of Conference, many animating and interesting discussions were evoked, much important business transacted, and several measures eminently calculated to advance our rising Connexion were considered and decided upon. In all the debates of Conference, the general tone and spirit of the blessed gospel, the love and harmony of Christianity, were prominenЯy developed. Indeed, all the members of Conference appeared determined to obey the apostolic injunction to be of "one mind; and, verily, we can all say that "the God of love and peace was with

us."

I believe it is the unanimous opinion that we never enjoyed a more agreeable Conference. The writer has attended every Conference since 1844, save one, and can state that such kindly feeling, gentlemanly bearing, and Christian courtesy he never before had the pleasure of witnessing. Even in the heat of the most important and exciting debates, scarcely a word dropped that exhibited an unwise spirit; and most assuredly there has been no development of a temper indicating the heart to be in a state unworthy of, or unfit for, a session of Conference.

The statistics show an increase both in our finances and in the number of our members; and while the Sabbath-school department of our work furnishes cause for humility and sorrow, every other part of our widely-extended field of operation shows reason for gratitude and encouragement. The promise given by the God-Man to his disciples has been fulfilled, "Lo, I am with you always." Several of our Circuits have been visited with the mighty power of God, in the gospel of his Son, producing many remarkable conversions, and a very good increase to Zion. Our institutions are generally in a healthy state.

True, we have had a history of struggles and conflicts to attain our present position; but we have succeeded, and now our responsibilities and position are of no ordinary grade. Our principles, our organization, and our professions, all urge us to the work of spreading the gospel, and of promoting Christian liberty. We have made a noble beginning, and must not falter. The Conference is determined to aim at a scale of effort and success worthy of God's cause and of the day in which we live. ready have scores, hundreds

Al

yea,

thousands, imbibed the principles and followed the example of he first secession body from Wesleyanism; and many more, both clergymen and laymen, are labouring to bring their different religious organizations to the liberal and increasingly popular principles of the New Connexion. They find that not only are our principles becoming daily more necessary, but are also more easy to obtain now than in former times; that the example of a large religious body of seceders, and the growing public sentiment, recommend them; and to adopt our principles, all the Methodist Churches will, we think, be ultimately brought. No earthly might can resist the divine energy that gives impulse to the onward march of truth. The age is ominous. The present century is one of thought, of examination. All organizations are undergoing a process of analyzation by the powerful searchings of reason. The brightness of midday is gathering round our beloved Connexion. The business habits of several members of Conference have greatly tended to lessen our sessions-to promote and benefit our work; in this respect our principal men are the Revs. J. H. Robinson, W. McClure, T. T. Howard, T. Goldsmith, together with R. H. Brett, M. Aikman, and W. Webb, Esqs.

Amid many causes of joy, we had some matters that occasioned a feeling of melancholy. When the solemn question was propounded, "Who has died during this year?" the most profound silence was maintained for several seconds, and then was announced the decease of three of our ministers. After several appropriate remarks from different brethren upon the character, labours, usefulness and death of late ministers, the president rose, and, in a most solemn and moving style, gave out that most appropriate hymn

Come, let us join our friends above Who have obtained the crown, &c. the whole of which was sung by the Conference, while every heart throbbed with feeling, and many eyes were moistened with tears. That memorable occasion will long be remembered by all who were present. There is one other matter that I must not forget. For the first time since I joined the Conference, I missed from his accustomed and prominent place our esteemed late General Superintendent Rev. H. O. Crofts, D.D. Often has he aided in our deliberations, assisted in our business, and presided over our Conferences; and much, indeed, is he endeared to many of our people. But though absent from us, he is, I am per

suaded, doing all he can for us; his place has been well and ably supplied by the Rev. J. H. Robinson, our present much-beloved General Superintendent. N. C. GOWAN, Conference Reporter.

PRESENTATION TO JOSEPHI
LOVE, ESQ.

ON Monday evening, the members and friends of the Methodist New Connexion held a public tea-meeting in the New Town-hall, at Durham, for the purpose of presenting a testimonial of their esteem to Joseph Love, Esq., of Willington-house. The testimonial consisted of an elegant epergne candelabrum, manufactured by Messrs. Reid and Sons, Newcastle-on-Tyne, and valued at about £100, and, in addition to its adaptation for holding candles, can be used either for flowers or fruits. About 500 sat down to an excellent tea, with all the usual accompaniments, provided by Mr. Wilkinson, grocer, of this city. Tea having been concluded, and the meeting opened with an hymn.

ROBERT THWAITES, Esq., was called to the chair, and introduced the pleasing business of the evening by an appropriate speech.

Mr. LAMBERT, secretary to the committee, then addressed the meeting at some length, and concluded by reading the inscriptiou engraved on the testimonial, as follows:

"Presented to Joseph Love, Esq., of Willington house, and by members friends of the Methodist New Connexion, in the Sunderland Circuit, as a mark of their approbation of his high moral cha racter, and as an acknowledgment of the great liberality and devotedness to the interests of religion by which his career has been distinguished. Presented on behalf of the subscribers by Robert Thwaites, Esq., in the New Town-hall, Durham. Sept. 13, 1852."

The CHAIRMAN then rose for the purpose of making the presentation; and, in a suitable address, gave utterance to the high estimation in which Mr. Love was held for his exalted moral worth, his disinterested benevolence and public usefulness, especially in promoting the interests of Christianity. Amongst some of his excellent doings, it was stated that Mr. Love had largely promoted, by his influence and liberality, the erection of about six chapels in that neighbourhood.

JOSEPH LOVE, Esq., then rose and said-I have great pleasure in expressing

my gratitude and thanks to the committee, and to all my friends who have been connected with the presentation to me of the testimonial now before us. (Loud applause.) I am not one of those people, neither would I wish to be, who set no value either upon the praise or the disapprobation of their fellow-men. I esteem the good opinion of my fellow-men, in order that I may be of more benefit to them, have greater access to them, and be the means of promoting their spiritual happiness. My principal desire is not to shine in the world, nor to mingle with the great and noble, but to mingle with the pious and good. (Applause.) I esteem it a much greater honour to receive an expression of this kind from the Church than I should have done from the world. I love the Church, I delight in it, and it has been my happiness from infancy to be connected with it; and I attribute all my happiness to my piety to God, and to my devotedness to his cause. (Applause.)

The testimonial before me is splendid, 1 admit; yet I do not put much value upon the article itself, but I do put a great value upon the disposition which has produced it, for it is the good opinion of my fellow-men, in which I delight, and that good opinion I shall ever cultivate, and ever study to increase. (Applause.) As I said before, anything coming from the Church I esteem as a much greater honour than from any other source, an i especially as it comes from that branch of the Church with which I have been connected from boyhood, because I esteem it more highly than any other in the world. (Applause.) It comes from that section of the Church of God to which my heart is closely wedded; more so, indeed, than to any profit which I have in the world. I delight more in the prosperity of the New Connexion than I do in the prosperity of my own business or in my own family; it was the choice of my youth, and I have admired it as I have advanced in life. The more I consult the principles upon which the Connexion is established, the more I admire them; and though I never saw our founder, yet I love him, and admire the wisdom which guided him in the adoption of the discipline by which we, as a body of Christians, are governed. (Applause.) I feel proud to see not only our Christian friends around me on this occasion, but also a very great number of those who are serving me daily; for I covet their esteem next to that of the Church. (Applause.) I think it is most desirable for a master to gain the affection of his

my

servants to keep harmony and union between them-and whenever it can be effected it will never fail to be beneficial. (Loud applause.) Animosity and bad feeling between masters and servants are always attended with injury to the master, and ruin and distress to the servants; and I assure you that it is constant study to act liberally to all employed under me. (Loud applause.) I never allow myself to do an act that I would not wish to be done to me if I were placed in the same circumstances, and always prefer drawing to drivingkindness to harshness; and I believe it is to this that I owe my success in having gained the affection of the men under me. I can see individuals of every grade of society, and I look back along the road which I have come, and perhaps this enables me to treat the men better than if I had never moved in other circumstances than those in which I now am; and I have no higher pleasure, next to my Christian spiritual enjoyments, and next to the promotion of Christianity, than to promote the comfort of every man who comes within my influence. (Loud applause.) If I can remove sorrow, poverty, and distress, this is my highest happiness. (Applause.) However rich may be, I do not value it, but how much good I can do is my daily happiness, and my highest gratification. Our worthy chairman has spoken of chapel-building, and I certainly should be much gratified at seeing a splendid chapel in Durham. (Applause.) You know that I have offered £200 to get a chapel in this city, which is ready whenever you will build one -(loud applause)-and then, perhaps, I will come and tell you we must have a very different chapel at Brancepeth. (Applause.) We are too much crowded there, I am happy to say, although the chapel has been enlarged, but I do hope that by next summer we shall have a comfortable chapel at Brancepeth. Now, in these things I do delight. I am not one that courts flattery, or aims to have worldly profits and gains, but I do study to aim at whatever I think will promote Christianity; because, in proportion to a man's piety, so will he pass through this world happy; and whatever spiritual influence you can give him will best support him through the troubles and afflictions of this world, and inspire his mind with a prospect beyond this life, which will afford a comfort to his mind which no worldly circumstances or advantages can impart. (Applause.) Therefore, when I consider that I can impart spi

ritual consolation and spiritual privileges, this is a source of much greater pleasure than any temporal prosperity; and if God in his Providence shall spare me, I shall be prouder, much prouder, than I am this evening, when I shall come down to Durham to see that you have a new chapel open for divine worship. (Loud applause) With these remarks I beg to withdraw.

The meeting was afterwards addressed by the Revs. W. Ford, of Shelton; Thomas Griffiths, Superintendent of the Sunderland Circuit; C. Linley, our Minister resident at Durham; and Mr. R. Sutherland. The meeting was full of interest from the beginning to the end, and will long be remembered by all present.

We hope our friends at Durham will now take heart, and arise and build. The time, the set time, to favour our Zion has now come. Let there be no further delay. You have the means. Do it!

LECTURES AND LECTURERS.

MR. EDITOR,-With open eye and liberal heart, you have opened the "Connexional Department" in your serial, not more to reporters than suggesters. The function of the one is to show what is, of the other what may be the one deals with the past, the other with the future; the one describes the real, the other pourtrays the possible. This is as but few things earthly are besidesas it should be. Reporting and suggesting are mighty levers of mortal progress. By these we leave "the things which are behind and reach forth to those before." Permit me, sir, to appear in your pages as a suggester, with a suggestion by which the interests of our Churches and congregations may be aided and advanced.

All subjects,

This is a lecturing age. political, mechanical, and biographical, scientific and theologic, are treated of in lectures; and all classes, the labouring, the clerical, aye, and the aristocratical, furnish lecturers. Thus knowledge has been and is widely and wonderfully diffused. The lecturer has the advantage of bringing into the small compass of an hour, knowledge which has been collected during a long life; and by means of maps, diagrams, and illustrations, of placing close at hand a distant scene, and of dressing up the abstract in the drapery of the concrete. "Much in little' is his watchword.

Now, sir, it is known to you and to your readers, that Churches have not

left untouched and unused this means of good. The "Young Men's Christian Association," in the Metropolis, making us an annual present of "Exeter Hall Lectures," with others of like existence and end in large provincial towns, is proof of this. Yet to us it scarcely appears that this instrument of improvement is either so generally or so successfully tried as it should be. For instance, how very little we have of it in connexion with our Churches and congregations! And where it is found, how contracted and confined! Our venerable and respectable friends do not trouble the lecture-room. It is a nursery, and they have a pretty tolerable notion of their having been nursed once, and they hold pretty tenaciously to the belief that to be nursed once is enough!

As a Connexion, then, it would appear that the lecturing influence, to say the least of it, has not intoxicated us. We have drunk it but little, and that little has been rather weak and watery! Let us drink it a little more heartily and freely. I should not like us to be drunk with it. You know what I mean, Mr. Editor? But let us take it regularly, periodically, and withal moderately; not in homœopathic doses exactly, nor yet in wholesale draughts, but moderately, which means midway of two extremes, In such measure, it would be a means of renovation and robustness to the body; it would brighten our eye, colour our cheek, strengthen our arm, and put life into our frame.

In the district where your correspondent serves his generation, the ministers have heartily taken up the subject. They have arranged a course of lectures to be delivered during the wintry months and dark nights, now gently stealing upon us. Any principal Church or congregation in the district can have it by application: price "Ask, and ye shall receive." The course itself is intended to be a summary, or small edition, or scraps, or crumbs which fall from the table of Church history. That it may not be dry or dull, insipid or uninteresting, each lecture will contain a biography, and each biography a history. You know, Mr. Editor, the world's epochs or periods are oft held in the hands of the world's heroes or personages. Biography is history. Great men are representative. On this ground, we of this district thought it wise and well to teach Church history in connexion with human biography. Our worthies, like the God-placed and God-preserved lights in the firmament," are

"for

signs and for seasons." A man is often an age or epoch, or index to the book of human life. But here are the subjects:

I. Polycarp; or, Christianity Persecuted.

II. Constantine; or, Christianity Established.

III. Peter the Hermit; or, Christianity and Chivalry.

IV. Wycliffe; or, Christianity and the
Bible.

V. Leo X.; or, Christianity and Popery. VI. Luther; or, Christianity and Protestantism.

VII. Wesley; or, Christianity in Earnest. VIII. Kilham; or, Christianity and Liberty.

This lecturing system, if adopted amongst us, will be a mutual good to the lecturer and the lectured. Taking it for granted that our ministers will be most frequently our lecturers, how beneficial to them! First, in enabling them to have clear and comprehensive, fixed and finished, views of persons and periods previously but little or indistinctly known. Before we have worked out for ourselves, after careful, industrious and elaborate inquiry, our views of this person or that period-worked them out into an essay, or lecture, or book-we can scarcely be said to have any views. We may have the indistinct, misty, motley view of the sea-voyager, who, well-nigh out of sight of land, cannot discern and distinguish men from cattle and cattle from men. We must get on shore, search and see for ourselves, and then we can confidently and clearly report. This is the lecturer's task.

Again. This exercise will supply agreeable diversity, and healthy liberality, to a preacher's mind. We need new themes and new methods, alike to enlighten and liberalize us. How, then, do better than taste the diversified courses, and try the pleasant exercises, of the lecturer? Preachers, for purposes of recreation and relief from harder and more care-worn studies, should become lecturers.

Moreover, the growing tendency of the age and the liberal genius of the Connexion need, ask, demand this step, study and service. If we will not, others will, lecture. Mechanics' Institutions, Athenæums and kindred societies will draw off our best, our inquiring, our influential young men. There bald-headed atheism, sanctimonious - looking pantheism, or well-dressed formalism will come before their view, and, by fair pretensions, wily promises and airy prospects, lead them astray and awry. Oh, do not, I beseech you, allow this wellconstructed and powerful-working loco

motive to be handled, braked and guided by those only who drive it along the railway which terminates in darkness and damnation!

Still further. Look at our Connexion. Is it not thoughtful, liberal, soul-like at its very core? Inquiry must sanctify and enshrine, cannot nullify and extirpate it. Power-loving, priest-loving systems may tread down or tremble at the march and machinery of the age; but we are safe and sound at heart. Ours is a free, unfettered, ever-opening, ever-expanding, all-elastic system. In ignorance it will appear base, in knowledge brilliant. Up, then, ye sons of the morning! and let your light irradiate the ample page of history, the deep secrets of science, and the world-wide purposes of God. I am, Sir, for the

Preachers of the Dudley District, ONE OF THEM.

Sept. 17th, 1852.

BRISTOL HOME-MISSION STATION.OPENING OF CALLOW-HILL CHAPEL. Having received our appointment for Bristol, we came to this important city to labour for precious souls. We entered perfect strangers, nor did we know where we should raise our banner; but knowing that the mission was according to the mind of that gracious God whose compassion for perishing sinners had distilled in the tears of Jesus and gushed in a crimson stream from his heart on Calvary, and who had also pledged his almighty power for the full triumphs of the Gospel in the world, we believed he would guide us to a proper place. In our labours we did not expect extraordinary providences nor miraculous interpositions. Man must use the means, do his duty with his might, and God will give his blessing; but faith and patience must be tried. We walked over the city to find a suitable place to commence operations, but could not see our way for weeks, and our faith was tried.

At length we took the chapel we are now occupying, which is situated in a densely-populated part of the city, where we are likely to succeed. It will seat about two hundred and fifty, and is lighted with gas. We took it for £18 per annum, the landlord having engaged to put it in good condition at his own expense. We immediately commenced giving publicity to our object, by large posters, small bills, and personal invitations. We were assisted much in the last respect by Mrs. Whitehouse, formerly of Birmingham; Messrs. Ellis and Hawley, of Staffordshire; and Mr. Ait

The

kins, of Lees, who was on a visit to his friends. In the interval, the chapel was made clean and neat, and all was ready when Sunday morning, Aug. 15th, opened on us. This was a day of intense solicitude and fervent prayer. We felt it was an important day to ourselves and to our beloved community. We were going to prove in Bristol, as we were doing in Bolton, that the Connexion has within itself the principle of expansion, and also to silence the taunt uttered by foes and keenly felt by all the zealous friends in our community, that we had done little or nothing to extend the Redeemer's kingdom in the south of England. weather, which during the week had been very unpropitious, to our very great joy cleared up, so that we had a fine Sabbath. The chapel was opened at halfpast ten for divine service. As we were not sanguine about a large congregation, we were pleased to see about seventy adults present. In the evening the body of the chapel was filled, and there was a good number in the gallery. I suppose there were about two hundred present. I discoursed in the morning on the public worship of God, and in the evening unfolded my mission in a discourse on the full and universal mercy of God to sinners through Christ, based on these words, "He delighteth in mercy." At the close of each service, without alluding to any of the unhappy agitations of the Wesleyan Connexion, either when we separated or at the present time, I gave the date of our origin and a brief statement of the constitution of our Churches. I informed the people that our object in coming to Bristol was to take a part with the Churches in the city, in labouring for the salvation of souls; that, in obedience to the command of Christ, we had committed ourselves to the difficult and glorious work; that we were ready to make sacrifices, to exercise self-denial, and to labour hard in this good work; and that, with the goodwill of man and the favour of God, we believed we should succeed. I therefore solicited the friendly recognition and fervent prayers of the members of other Churches who might be present. Several came forward at the close of each service, and with a hearty shake of the hand wished me God speed.

We cannot expect many of those who were present to become permanent members of the congregation; but it is a matter of congratulation that so many were present. We only expect to see a good regular congregation as the result of prudent, patient, and persevering labour.