Old or New School Methodism?: The Fragmentation of a Theological Tradition

On September 7, 1881, Matthew Simpson, Bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church, in a London sermon asserted that, "As to the divisions in the Methodist family, there is little to mar the family likeness." Nearly a quarter-century earlier, Benjamin Titus (B.T.) Roberts, a minister in the same branch of Methodism as Simpson, had published an article titled in the Northern Independent in which he argued that Methodism had split into an "Old School" and "New School." He warned that if the new ...