ment, but by a "home for the sons of the prophets, the Philip Emburys of the coming century, while pursuing their sacred studies."

"Barbara Heck," writes Bishop Fowler in commemorating this event, "put her brave soul against the rugged possibilities of the future, and throbbed into existence American Methodism. The leaven of her grace has leavened a continent. The seed of her piety has grown into a tree so immense that a whole flock of commonwealths come and lodge in the branches thereof, and its mellow fruits drop into a million homes. To have planted American Methodism; to have watered it with holy tears; to have watched and nourished it with the tender, sleepless love of a mother and the pious devotion of a saint; to have called out the first minister, convened the first congregation, met the first class, and planned the first Methodist church edifice, and to have secured its completion, is to have merited a monument as enduring as American institutions, and, in the order of Providence, it has received a monument which the years cannot crumble, as enduring as the Church of God. The life-work of Barbara Heck finds its counterpart in the living energies of the Church she founded."

Canadian Methodism has not been unmindful of its obligation to this sainted woman, and is erecting as a perpetual memorial a Barbara Heck Woman's Residence in connection with Victoria University, Toronto.

XI.

DR. COKE, THE FATHER OF METHODIST MISSIONS. THE special characteristic of Methodism is its missionary zeal. It obeys the exhortation of its founder, to go not only to those who need it, but to those who need it most. It delights to remember the forgotten, to succour the neglected, to seek out the forsaken. As if prescient of the destined universality of the Church which he planted, John Wesley with prophetic soul exclaimed, "The world is my parish."

On many a field of sacred toil have the ministers of the Methodist Church vindicated its distinction of being pre-eminently a missionary Church-amid the cinnamon groves of Ceylon, in the crowded bazaars or tangled jungles of India, among the teeming populations of China, in sunny islands of the Southern Seas, in the Zulu's hut and the Kaffir's kraal, and amid the strongholds of heathen savagery. With a prouder boast than the Roman poet, they may exclaim, “ What region in the world is not full of our labour?" In every land beneath the sun this grand old Mother of Churches has her daughters fair and flourishing, who rise up and call her blessed. The Sabbath chant of her hymns engirdles the earth with an anthem of praise, and the sheen of her spires rejoices in the light of a ceaseless morning.

To no man does Methodism owe more its missionary character than to the Rev. Thomas Coke, D.C.L. This marvellous man, of puny form but of giant energy, with a burning zeal kindled at the altar of eternal truth-like the angel of the Apocalypse, flying abroad under the whole heaven with the Everlasting Gospel-preached the glad evangel of God's grace in both hemispheres, became the founder of Wesleyan Missions in the East and West Indies, and the first Bishop of the American Methodism-a Church now boundless as the continent. After crossing eighteen times the stormy sea, he was at last buried in its depths, whose waters, like his influence, engirdle the world. The study of this heroic life will be fruitful at once in lessons of gratitude to God, of inspiration to duty, and of zeal in the service of the Divine. Master.

Nestling in the soft valley of the Usk, surrounded by the towering mountains of Wales, lies the old ecclesiastical borough of Brecon, the site of an ancient Dominican priory, whose ivy-mantled walls form one of the most picturesque ruins in Britain. In the oakroofed, time-stained town hall of the ancient borough, at the middle of the last century, might have been seen, arrayed in the robes and insignia of office, a worthy alderman dispensing justice to the rural litigants of the neighbourhood. This was the chief magistrate of Brecon and the father of Thomas Coke.

The future Apostle of Methodism, unlike many of its early ministers, was the heir of a large patrimony. He was born three years before the middle of the