to offer our homage to the noble men who founded Methodism—such
saintly men as the Wesleys, Coke, Asbury, Robert Strawbridge, George
Whitefield, Nathaniel Perigau, Philip Catch, —to name but a few—
righteous, God-fearing men who laid the foundation of a great Chris-
tian institution and contributed so much to the spiritual development of
this great nation.

These were men who believed in the truth and pursued it relent-
lessly, oftentimes at great sacrifice to themselves. They were men
who devoted their lives to Christian ideals and Christian principles, in
search always of the noble and the righteous, and disdaining the cheap,
the vain, the artificial. These were men who dedicated themselves to
their families, their communities, their church, their nation, acknowl-
edging that without these institutions of society a Christian civilization
could not long exist. These were men who loved their neighbors, as
they were taught to do by the Savior whose words they spread abroad
in the manner and in the spirit of the first evangelists. These were
men who respected the belief and the sacraments of others but who
held firmly to their own concepts of Christian obligation and to their
own manner of worshipping God. There was something of the simplicity
and the nobility of the Man of Nazareth in the character and the
bearing of these new disciples of Christ. And also, there was something
Christlike in the courage and the determination of these men who
sought to breathe a new life and a new spirit in the Church of Christ.

We hear and talk much nowadays about the evils of our age—about
such evils as materialism, false values, lack of purpose. We are gravely
concerned with the behavior of the people, with crime, delinquency,
poverty, conflict, turmoil. In such circumstances, it behooves us, I think,
to turn back to the "faith of our fathers, " in whose minds was the
wisdom of the ages and in whose souls were the virtues of civilized
mankind.

The rise of Methodism in the new world roughly parallels the rise
of the United States of America as a free and independent nation, and
the early Methodists, with their abiding love of liberty and justice,
were a strong influence in the growth and development of our country.
The origin of the liberty we cherish as Americans was expressed well by
the greatest of all Methodists, John Wesley, the founder of our beloved
church. In a message he sent to Americans in the first year of their
freedom, Wesley said: "Stand fast in the liberty wherewith God so
strangely made you free. " We Methodists know that the freedom we
enjoy as Americans was divinely inspired and divinely endowed, and

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