ve all the other ordinances and institutions of
religion--giving as an authority the words of John Wesley himself--am I
to be charged with having written against class-meeting? So far from
having written against these meetings, I have expressed myself in the
strongest terms in their favour; and I repeat that, after the public
preaching of the Word, and the Lord's Supper, I believe class-meetings
have been the most efficient means of promoting personal and vital piety
among the members of the Wesleyan Societies.

Yet I am not insensible to the fact that Mr. Wesley found the prototype
of this kind of religious exercises, not in any institution or practice
of the Primitive Church for fifteen hundred years, but in a society of
Monks called _La Trappe_, whose ardent piety Mr. Wesley greatly admired,
the lives of some of whose members (such as the Marquis de Renty, etc.,)
he wrote, and whose manual of piety (Imitation of Jesus Christ) he
translated and abridged, for the use of his own Societies, and several
of whose questions in conducting what may be called their weekly band or
class-meetings, Mr. Wesley adopted, translated and modified, for
conducting his own meetings of a similar character. These weekly
exercises in the Societe de la Trappe were eminently instrumental in
reforming, and kindling the name of devotional piety among its members;
and Mr. Wesley found them equally useful among the members of his own
Societies, and so they have continued till the present time. But will
any Wesleyan minister in England or Canada--will any man of intelligence
and honesty--venture to assert that Mr. Wesley ever intended that
attendance at such weekly exercises should be an essential condition and
fundamental test of membership in the visible Church of God? Will any
one assert, or can he believe, that Mr. Wesley ever could have
anticipated, or supposed, that such an application would, or could, be
made of an institution which he expressly stated to be "merely
prudential, not essential, not of divine origin?" But I am again met
with the charge, on another ground, of having departed from Mr. Wesley.
It is said, in substance: "Mr. Wesley has committed class-meeting to us
as a trust; it is not for us to inquire into the origin of the
institution; it is our duty to maintain inviolably the trust committed
to us--which trust Dr. Ryerson has violated." In reply, I remark that
the statement of the question itself is fallacious, and the charge