timable benefit to the
ill-provided Catholics of America. Rome might almost have been content
to see the wasting and destruction in her ancient strongholds, for the
opportune reinforcement which it brought, at a critical time, to the
renascent church in the New World. More important than the priests of
various orders and divers languages, who came all equipped for mission
work among immigrants of different nationalities, was the arrival of the
Sulpitians of Paris, fleeing from the persecutions of the French
Revolution, ready for their special work of training for the parish
priesthood. The founding of their seminary in Baltimore in 1791, for the
training of a native clergy, was the best security that had yet been
given for the permanence of the Catholic revival. The American Catholic
Church was a small affair as yet, and for twenty years to come was to
continue so; but the framework was preparing of an organization
sufficient for the days of great things that were before it.

* * * * *

The most revolutionary change suffered by any religious body in America,
in adjusting itself to the changed conditions after the War of
Independence, was that suffered by the latest arrived and most rapidly
growing of them all. We have seen the order of the Wesleyan preachers
coming so tardily across the ocean, and propagated with constantly
increasing momentum southward from the border of Maryland. Its
congregations were not a church; its preachers were not a clergy.
Instituted in England by a narrow, High-church clergyman of the
established church, its preachers were simply a company of lay
missionaries under the command of John Wesley; its adherents were
members of the Church of England, bound to special fidelity to their
duties as such in their several parish churches, but united in clubs and
classes for the mutual promotion of holy living in an unholy age; and
its chapels and other property, fruits of the self-denial of many poor,
were held under iron-bound title-deeds, subject to the control of John
Wesley and of the close corporation of preachers to whom he should demit
them.

It seems hardly worthy of the immense practical sagacity of Wesley that
he should have thought to transplant this system unchanged into the
midst of circumstances so widely different as those which must surround
it in America. And yet even here, where the best work of his preachers
was to be done among populations not only c