Excerpt from Journal of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church: Held in Cleveland, Ohio, May 1-28, 1896 We beseech you, therefore, first of all that you join us in a most earnest endeavor to secure a personal fitness to be a proper medium in this Conference, through which God can express his will con cerning the churches; that laying aside all unworthy ambitions we shall sincerely seek to know the mind of the Spirit, realizing that any personal advantage that is not for the good of the Church is for the damage of the individual. The words of the Master are of perpetual application, Watch and pray, therefore, lest ye enter into temptation. It cannot be too deeply impressed upon our minds that in all ages the Church has fallen far short of the divine ideal, both in purity and power. God's thought and plans for his Church are as high above ours as the heavens are above the earth. His Scrip tures are full of promises. His skies are full of Pentecosts. Ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you, is the limitless divine promise. Heaven and earth are put in pledge for fulfillment. Both shall pass away sooner than one jot or tittle of his word can fail. When we look at his ideal, promise, provision, and power, at the humiliation and exaltation of the Lord Jesus Christ, at the unwordable groanings of the Holy Spirit, it seems as if provision and performance were scarcely at all related. God's ideal for his Church is that both as individuals and as a whole it be without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, a pure38 Address of the Bishops. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.