|pv/;v OF 
 
 BISHOP WILSON 
 
 BEFORE THE 
 
 NORTH CAROLINA CONFERENCE 
 
 Methodist Episcopal Church, South 
 
 EPWORTH LEAGUE NIGHT 
 December 10, 1908 
 
 DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA 
 
 Pamphlet Collection 
 Duke Dwinity School 
 
ADDRESS 
 
 OF 
 
 BISHOP WILSON 
 
 BEFORE THE 
 
 NORTH CAROLINA CONFERENCE 
 
 Methodist Episcopal Church, South 
 
 e 
 
 EPWORTH LEAGUE NIGHT 
 
 December 10, 1908, Durham, N. C. 
 
 Nashville, Tenn. ; Dallas, Tex. 
 Pullishing House of the M. E. Church, South 
 Smith & Lamar, Agents 
 1909 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2014 
 
 https://archive.org/details/addressbeforenorOOwils 
 
ADDRESS OF BISHOP WILSON 
 
 I am put now and then at rather an unaccustomed 
 work, and I am half inclined to do what I have never 
 done yet, never want to do — apologize. I have to 
 make confession that I have been brought into contact 
 with the Epworth League work of the Church less 
 than with any other department. It has so happened 
 that the mission work has engrossed my attention, 
 thought, and labor. I have responded almost to every 
 call that has been made upon me, but for some reason 
 or other this is about the first time that I have been 
 asked to make an Epworth League speech; so I am 
 raw at the business. You will have to excuse one of 
 my age appearing under such conditions; and if the 
 speech does not measure up to all of the demands, 
 charge it to the account of those who were so misled 
 as to invite me. 
 
 But I want you to understand that it is not because 
 I take no interest in the Epworth League work. I 
 have watched its work from afar. We ought to give 
 it a good deal more interest and concern ; and the more 
 I think of it and the more I look at it, the more pro- 
 foundly it moves me. I sometimes wonder what St. 
 Paul would say, would think, would feel if he should 
 suddenly drop into the midst of this world's life of 
 to-day. I have often thought that if he should drop 
 down into the Church of to-day he would assume natu- 
 
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rally and inevitably the leadership of the Christian hosts. 
 I can imagine what his thoughts would be; I can im- 
 agine his feelings — such a paean of triumph that never 
 was heard from human hearts would go up from him. 
 I cannot imagine exactly what he would do. I am not 
 great enough, and he has not given us enough of his 
 active operations to let us know what he would do. 
 I am not speaking of his operations as at all narrow 
 or defective. He left nothing out from the day that 
 he saw the vision in Damascus until he stood before 
 Caesar's bar and preached the gospel so that all the 
 Gentiles might hear. He never rested. I do not think 
 he even rested in his sleep ; he had dreams that were 
 recorded in his Epistles, and they were dreams of the 
 Church's future history. He saw visions that no man 
 of his time could see ; but if that great-souled man, 
 with his marvelous insight into human needs and hu- 
 man conditions, with his extraordinary conceptions of 
 his Master's greatness, of his Master's purposes, of 
 his Master's work, were to drop into our midst, I think 
 that undoubtedly he would assume entirely the leader- 
 ship of God's Church. He would stir it up into such 
 a spirit of aggressiveness and infuse into it such ele- 
 ments of power as would come from his apostolic 
 leadership. 
 
 I think two things would have especially attracted 
 his attention — one a realization of his own notion of 
 the perseverance of the Church and its gospel. We 
 have got to the point now where we are beginning to 
 have some idea of what he meant when he talked about 
 Jesus Christ as "Lord of all," and when he prophesied 
 the getting hold of all the various lines of human activ- 
 ities and bringing them in front of the Lord that he 
 might use them. We are beginning to see that there 
 
 4 
 
is nothing in this God-given and God-ordered world 
 of ours that does not belong to the Church of Jesus 
 Christ and ought not to be used for its purposes. We 
 have gone into business; we have gone into all the 
 great enterprises of the world ; we have gone even into 
 politics and got hold of the politicians. [Laughter.] 
 Now, you may laugh at that; but the time is coming, 
 and it is not far distant, when the highest distinction 
 that a man can enjoy will be that he is a Christian 
 politician. It is no disgrace to be a politician. Don't 
 think that. Sometimes we feel that a man is disgraced 
 because of the fact that he is a politician. A few 
 years ago I was preaching at a camp meeting in Vir- 
 ginia upon some of my old camping grounds, and 
 along beside me in the stand sat one of my old sup- 
 porters and helpers in the days of my early ministry, 
 a man eighty years of age and a born politician — 
 never could have been anything else except a politi- 
 cian to save his life, and yet a man of stainless integ- 
 rity and against whose fair name I have never heard a 
 word of complaint. That man sat there and shouted 
 the praises of God with as much earnestness as he 
 ever had a speech on the hustings. When I was pastor 
 of a Church in Washington City, I had a lot of poli- 
 ticians coming to my services — members of the House 
 and of the Senate from various parts of the country. 
 There was one man among them whom I could have 
 trusted as I would one of the apostles. He not only 
 came to church Sunday mornings, but he came Sunday 
 nights, and Wednesday nights to prayer meeting; and 
 if I gave him anything to do on the committee, he was 
 there ready to render any service to the Church that 
 he could render and at whatever cost. You could trust 
 him to the last minute. He was a Christian politician. 
 
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[Cries of "Amen! Amen!"] He could not have 
 been anything else except a politician; but he was a 
 sanctified politician. We are going to have repre- 
 sentatives in the White House, we are going to have 
 Christian politicians in the House and in the Senate 
 in years to come who will acknowledge the Church as 
 the supreme factor in human life, and the lordship of 
 Jesus Christ will be proclaimed by the Chief Justice 
 of the Supreme Court. We are going to take posses- 
 sion of the whole business, from the ground up, and 
 we want the world to know it. St. Paul would have 
 given utterances of his exuberance of joy at seeing the 
 Church daring to assert its lordship of all. He would 
 have exulted in it. 
 
 There are some business men who believe that Christ 
 ought to come into their business as a partner. They 
 do not do anything to drive him out. There are some 
 politicians who are ready to recognize him as their 
 leader and a great lawgiver. We have men in the 
 large enterprises of our commercial life who say to 
 the world distinctly: "You cannot come in here while 
 I have to do with this thing." We had one man in 
 New York who said that he was not going to defile 
 himself with the association of anything of the sort. 
 We are going to take possession of that kind of life. 
 
 In this work the Church has stood first of all. Of 
 course we want men and women who will take care of 
 the local concerns; and until a comparatively late 
 period we did not go much beyond that. We were 
 looking after our own affairs; we were only intent 
 upon cultivating our own potato patch. I remember 
 how it was thirty years ago when I first went into the 
 mission work. It was the hardest thing I ever under- 
 took. I had to dig down to get a consciousness, and 
 
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it was a mighty hard thing to do. Then we were bent 
 only on local affairs. We had our home missions, 
 and had to take care of everything right around our 
 own doors ; but, bless your life, we cannot live without 
 the work that lies beyond our call. Then by and by 
 we began to think about the thing, and the women 
 started up and said they had a hand in this affair. 
 Despite their wonderful sympathies, women are some- 
 times very self-asserting, and the men became uneasy. 
 [Laughter.] There are multitudes of women and 
 children far from our home who do not know Christ 
 and who are reduced to slavery. The women said we 
 must try to save them ; so they organized and went to 
 work. 
 
 Then the women said we must have the children 
 organized into juvenile societies; we must get their 
 pennies to help the cause. Then they went to work to 
 get hold of the Sunday schools on a somewhat larger 
 scale. Then the women got into the home mission; 
 and by that time the men began to feel that they had 
 not come up to their part as the male representatives 
 and heads of the household, and they were getting to 
 be uneasy. By and by they said: "We must get into 
 this thing and get to work." So they met in Chatta- 
 nooga last April, a thousand of them, to stir up the 
 Church and the world incidentally. And you know 
 what has come of it. They began the Laymen's Mis- 
 sionary Movement. 
 
 The Church has said that there is no department of 
 work that we are not going to get hold of. We want 
 the young men, the young women, and the young chil- 
 dren to take hold of this thing. "And it shall come to 
 pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my 
 Spirit upon all flesh : and your sons and your daughters 
 
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shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, 
 and your old men shall dream dreams : and on my serv- 
 ants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those 
 days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy." There 
 will be no classes excluded. We have got the children 
 working and have a great hold upon the young people. 
 
 About two thousand young people, you say? This 
 is not all of the young people we have, is it? About 
 sixty Leagues, I believe. How many charges ? About 
 two hundred? So you see the proportion. Well, we 
 have just begun, you see. I am glad you found the 
 report that has just been read encouraging. I am 
 not going to discourage you, for we are going to 
 get hold of a vast deal more than that. You may be 
 sure of it. [Cries of "Amen! Amen!"] We cannot 
 afford to neglect those things which St. Paul would 
 have undertaken. We do not send our sons to college 
 to learn theories alone or merely to learn to run a ma- 
 chine. They go to college and graduate and then take 
 off their fine clothes and their patent leather shoes 
 and put on their working clothes and begin in the dust, 
 darkness, and dirt of the shops; and they stay there 
 until they have learned everything thoroughly. It is 
 by practical experience that they learn. 
 
 I remember that in my early youth, when I was noth- 
 ing but a Church member, I went to class meetings 
 and talked with men about my religious life and had 
 them talk to me, and we used to hold little prayer 
 meetings around in private homes. Now and then 
 there was a family to be visited in which there was 
 some member who could not go to church. We would 
 often hold prayers in the home, and every night I 
 was doing some work of the sort. In that way I got 
 my training. This is what we want to do with the 
 
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young people of the Church. We want to get them to 
 work. What if we had known fifty years ago how to 
 do this work! What a magnificent thing would have 
 been done! If we had had the Epworth League fifty 
 years ago, we would have gone ahead with leaps and 
 bounds and accomplished far greater things. We 
 have done wonderful things considering the time, I 
 admit. 
 
 Young men, you have the most magnificent field and 
 the best that has ever been afforded. I had rather 
 have a young man's opportunity to-day than the world 
 that lay before Napoleon's feet at his command. Let 
 the members of the Church work together, and there 
 is nothing on earth that can resist it when you get the 
 body of the young people of the Church organized. 
 Then you will see such sights as the world has never 
 seen before — I was about to say since the apostolic 
 days. But the apostles never saw such sights as they 
 would be. You do not know what is to come ; but this 
 is what we want and this is what we must have. It is 
 the wisest thing the Church has done in recent years. 
 The great Master of us all, who knew how to adjust 
 the material to humanity's needs, wants to get hold of 
 the childhood of the Church. When the Saviour laid 
 his hands upon childhood and blessed it and said, "Of 
 such is the kingdom of heaven," he did not mean to 
 leave any element of that childhood out. He got hold 
 of the young ruler, you will remember; and when he 
 said to him, "Follow me," quitting everything else, he 
 meant that the youth of the Church should be brought 
 into subservience to his will that he might work out 
 with this great energy his plans and purposes for the 
 uplifting of the world. He wanted their vigor, their 
 enthusiasm, their warm blood, their splendid imagina- 
 
 9 
 
tions. And it takes these things to bring one into the 
 consciousness of a personal relationship to God. 
 
 The Epworth League is not a small thing; and to 
 tell you the truth I do not hesitate to say that until we 
 get the young people of the Church conscious of their 
 relation to God and pledged directly to Jesus Christ — 
 till we can do this we cannot hope to achieve the ends 
 of the Church. The time is coming; we must have it. 
 I am surprised that the Sunday school has done so 
 much, considering the fact that it has given only three- 
 quarters of an hour once each week. It is no fault of 
 the Sunday school that no more has been accomplished, 
 for this much time cannot revolutionize the lives of 
 the children. We must do better than that. I do not 
 wonder that the people in New York tried to get the 
 authorities to allow one-half a day to instruct the chil- 
 dren religiously during the week. They will get it 
 some day, too. [Cries of "Amen! Amen!"] In the 
 Sunday school there has been a great wealth of intel- 
 lect and spiritual power. Look how these men meet 
 each year to get their lessons ready. Look how the 
 grade of teachers gets higher and higher every year. 
 The Sunday school feeds the Church; yet this fact 
 alone is more or less insignificant. Put it alongside 
 the possibilities of the Epworth League, and it will 
 show insignificance. Great things will be seen by and 
 by when we have given more thought and more prayer 
 to our Epworth League movement ; but before we can 
 do this we must have the imagination of the young 
 people. 
 
 There is a point, however, in life where this faculty 
 fails us. The literary fellows cultivate it and put it 
 in shape for our amusement, and the dreamers who 
 never did anything practical cultivate it. But when a 
 
 10 
 
man gets into business, the time soon comes when he 
 discredits this imagination. The time comes when 
 men throw it away and say it is visionary. But the 
 loftiest man on earth is the man who can imagine most 
 splendidly. I want you to understand that the Church 
 of God has such a tremendous force with its far-reach- 
 ing influences in its purposes and efforts that the loft- 
 iest imagination of the greatest genius of the earth 
 cannot compass it. Shakespeare was the finest speci- 
 men of mere human intellect that this world has ever 
 seen. He was a wonderful man, and he occasionally 
 got glimpses and visions of something beyond. But 
 Shakespeare stands a mere fool with St. Paul's vision 
 of the third heaven. Contrast the finest of Shakespeare 
 with, say, a Psalm of David : "The heavens declare the 
 glory of God ; and the firmament showeth his handiwork. 
 Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night 
 showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, 
 where their voice is not heard." You can almost see 
 the Psalmist as he stands there. He must have heard 
 the chorus of the heavens. Shakespeare, too, must 
 have known something of this, for he said : 
 
 There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest 
 But in his motion like an angel sings, 
 Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins. 
 Such harmony is in immortal souls ; 
 But whilst this muddy vesture of decay 
 Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. 
 
 But, after all the heights to which he has carried you, 
 you have not touched the skirts of his garment, so 
 splendid is it all. We want imagination. We cannot 
 do without it. Cultivate it. 
 
 Young men, we are going to put you on ground 
 where you have never been before — ground never hith- 
 
 ii 
 
erto explored by the scientist and the investigator. We 
 are going to open up to you the unsurpassable riches 
 of Christ, and we want you to take and enlarge them 
 in your thought. I do not know whether you have 
 reached it yet or not ; but whenever you kill the im- 
 agination of the young men, you take away their vision. 
 It must be cultivated. Young men, we are going to 
 take you into fields of activity that have never been 
 exploited by commercial enterprises, into regions of 
 life never explored by any intellect. We are going to 
 lead you down into the mines of wealth that have never 
 been opened by the enterprising pioneers of the world. 
 And all these things are for you. 
 
 We want the young men to stay young, and to stay 
 young to the very last limit of life. I thank God I 
 have never given up my dreams of the future. [Cries 
 of "Amen ! Amen !"] My imaginations of the life be- 
 yond I have never given up, and never intend to. I 
 do not intend to lose my youth, for God is the strength 
 of my heart and my portion forever. [Cries of 
 "Amen!"] Gray hairs may come and failing flesh, 
 but God — and you cannot tell how big that word is — 
 is the strength of my soul. 
 
 This is why we want the young people. We want 
 them to keep alive and we want their energy and zeal, 
 for the Church needs them. We need the imagination 
 of the young man. He will put more zeal and energy 
 in a football game than you do in a whole year's work 
 in the ministry. [Laughter.] You know that. Well, 
 why shouldn't he? I have no defense of the game. 
 It is a game of risk — brutal, I admit; but it tries his 
 nerves, sets them all tingling at once, and he will dare 
 anything. For when a young fellow goes into that 
 sort of thing, he cannot help himself. Just stir him 
 
 12 
 
with those higher things and let him catch a glimpse 
 of the nobler, and nothing will stop him. He will 
 climb the inaccessible, where a goat could not get a 
 foothold. [Laughter.] But he will get there. "Per 
 aspera ad astral is his motto. We want just that sort 
 of energy for Church work, and we are going to get 
 it. [Cries of "Amen ! Amen!"] 
 
 Your mothers and fathers have lost that inspiration 
 nowadays. The young mother looks down in wonder 
 on her sleeping babe, and wonders what its dreams 
 can be. She imagines the beautiful sentiment oi 
 Wordsworth : 
 
 Not in entire forgetfulness, 
 
 And not in utter nakedness, 
 
 But trailing clouds of glory, do we come 
 
 From God, who is our home : 
 
 Heaven lies about us in our infancy. 
 
 The mother cannot enter into full sympathy with her 
 own baby, and as the child grows the dim and distant 
 light fades away. It comes down to the practical, to 
 plain thinking. Old Santa Claus is dead — we have lost 
 him. The "Arabian Nights" is nothing but a series 
 of fables and the imagination of childhood fancies and 
 of the zeal of youth. There is nothing to stir them to- 
 day. But let a child grow up free and untrammeled 
 in its imaginings. God gave him imagination, and let 
 him cultivate it. 
 
 But let the child's imagination live, and it will sooner 
 or later find out what is false and what is true. Let 
 him cherish those fancies of the imagination, and he 
 will live for them and die for them. Look at that old 
 apostle, that old man braced and marred in body, dim 
 in his vision, hobbling along through barbarous places, 
 having nothing but his gospel; but that was enough. 
 
 13 
 
He went up into the third heaven with it, and he 
 brought back visions that he never lost. They shut 
 him up in prison, but the very roof was lifted off and 
 he looked up and saw the splendid visions that are re- 
 ported to us in Ephesians. What a splendid vision of 
 St. Paul! The last words he left us were these: "I 
 am ready now to be offered ; I know the way I am go- 
 ing. I am ready to go. I have fought a good fight 
 and have conquered. I have finished the course," not a 
 foot left untrod ; "I have kept the faith," and never for 
 a moment let it go. "Henceforth there is laid up for 
 me a crown of righteousness." The old man's im- 
 aginings were as bright as they were the day he saw 
 the light break from the Syrian sky. Young man, 
 young woman, we want to bring you to that ; we want 
 to train you to follow the footsteps of Paul, and then 
 you will not be looking at your sordid surroundings. 
 
 Passing once over the Ba3^ of Bengal, a passenger 
 on a steamer, I was particularly struck with the beauti- 
 fulness of water. The sun was breaking down in the 
 west, striking the water, which was as clear as crystal 
 and as smooth as oil ; and gazing down into the depths 
 of it, I thought forcibly of John's vision as the old man 
 in Patmos must have seen it and wrote it out for us. 
 
 Young man, we want to get you to have such an 
 imagination, such a vision that you will gladly lift up 
 your hands to the Master to be taken in by him, and 
 you will see what Stephen saw — the Son sitting at the 
 right hand of God the Father. We want to bring you 
 to a life that shall have such an end as that. You 
 may have difficulty, pain, trouble, and disappointment, 
 and the cross may come between; but if such an end- 
 ing as that must come, let it come. You will sing as 
 Paul did. You will look out upon all that lies ahead, 
 
 14 
 
unseen and unknown, and, like the apostle, say: "I 
 am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, 
 nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor 
 things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other 
 creature, shall be able to separate me from the love of 
 God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." And with 
 this song on your lips you will drop in His arms. 
 
 15