People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 April 1896 — REVOLT OF LAITY. [ARTICLE]

REVOLT OF LAITY.

Methodlat Demand for Popular Powei Voiced by Dr. Townsend of Baltimore. Chicago, April 29. —Chicago methodism challenged the bishops, presiding elders and politicians of the Methodist Episcopal church of America last night. The knight who cast the gauntlet was Rev. Luther T. Townsend, D. D., of Mount Vernon Place Church, Baltimore. He did so at the request of the Chicago Methodist Social Union. Methodism, supposed to be the most conservative form of orthodox religion in America, was rebuked by a Methodist and Methodists. Little reference was made to Wesley, the founder of the church. But the bugle call was sounded for a battle which is to be founght in Cleveland next Friday. The general quadrennial conference of the Methodist church is to open there that day, and Chicago Methodists intend to plead for a new form of church government for the Methodists of America, which is to be of the people, by the people, and for the people. Dr. Townsend said this, and 1,200 stalwart Methodists applauded him to the echo. He arraigned the present form of government of the church. He denounced it as monarchical, as suppressing the voice of the laity, stifling the ambitions of the best ministers, making the bishops and the conference autocrats. These autocrats, he said, were retarding the progress of the church. He insisted that a democratic spirit was peeded at this hour in the policy of the church. His sole reference to Wesley was that he was an absolute dictator. “But,” he added, “Wesley was an ecclesiastical statesman and not an ecclesiastical politician.”* , He took up, point by the great questions which are now agitating Methodist bishops and elders in all parts of America. He advocated the admission of laymen of the church to the annual conferences arid held they should have more voice in the general conferences. He scored the time-limit rule now applying to pastors and pronounced the present appointing power of bishops as undemocratic.