mbership in the Wesleyan Church, were driven to seek
admission into some other Christian communion.

Our Lord and His Apostles have prescribed no form of religious communion
but the Lord's Supper. The New Testament meetings of Christian
fellowship, in which the early Christians edified one another, are
appropriately adduced as the exemplars of Wesleyan love-feasts--that
voluntary and useful means of religious edification. But it is
remarkable that a person may neither attend love-feast nor the Lord's
Supper, and yet retain his membership in the Wesleyan Church, while he
is excluded from it if he does not attend class-meeting, though he may
attend both the Lord's Supper and love-feast, as well as the preaching
of the word and meetings for prayer. Nay, I find in the latter part of
the section of our Discipline on "Class Meetings," that the minister in
charge of a circuit is required to exclude all "those members of the
Church who wilfully and repeatedly neglect to meet their class," but to
state at the time of their exclusion, "that they are laid aside for a
breach of our rules of Discipline, and not for immoral conduct." I know
of no Scriptural authority to exclude any person from the Church of
Christ on earth, except for that which would exclude him from the
kingdom of glory, namely, "immoral conduct." But here is an express
requirement for the exclusion of persons from the Wesleyan Church for
that which it is admitted is not "immoral conduct," namely, neglect of
class-meeting. This is certainly going beyond Scriptural authority and
example.

I have said that I do not regard as Wesleyan, or having the sanction of
Mr. Wesley, the making attendance at class-meeting an essential
condition of membership in the Church of Christ. Mr. Wesley declared
that the sole object of his labours was, not to form a new sect, but to
revive religion in the Church and in the nation; that each class was a
voluntary society in the Church, but was no more a separate Church
organization than a Bible Society, or Temperance Society, or Young Men's
Christian Association, is a separate Church organization. Nor did Mr.
Wesley regard the admission of persons into, or exclusion from, any one
of his societies as affecting, in the slightest degree, such person's
Church membership. Nay, Mr. Wesley insisted that all who joined his
societies, in addition to attending class-meeting, and the ministrations
of his preachers, should regularly attend the servic