History of the M.E. Church, Vol. IV - Media Sabda Org

grandchildren were gay and playful; but I and the elders of the house felt that it was evening with
us." In 1808 he "came to it as to a home in mourning. His old friend Harry Gough was dead, and he
buried him with tears. The old home never ceased to be attractive, but was ever afterward desolate
to the veteran traveler. In 1811 he preached to the family in their private chapel, and writes, "All to
me seems yet to be in sackcloth here ;" and as late as 1818 he says, "We came to Perry Hall. Alas,
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how solitary!" His old friend Otterbein still lingers in Baltimore. "I gave," he writes the same year,
"an evening to the great Otterbein. I found him placid and happy in God." Boehm was with them,
and says "that was an evening I shall never forget. Two noble souls met, and their conversation was
rich, and full of instruction. They had met frequently before. This was their last interview on earth."
The good German divine was failing fast. The next year the bishop preached the "funeral sermon"
of "the holy, the great Otterbein," as he calls him. "Solemnity," he says, "marked the silent meeting
in the German Church, where were assembled the members of our Conference, and many of the
clergy of the city. Forty years have I known the retiring modesty of this man of God, towering
majestic above his fellows in learning, wisdom, and grace, yet seeking to be known only of God and
the people of God. He had been sixty years a minister, fifty years a converted one."
His journals begin to show the decay of old age, though he is more cheerful than heretofore. The
goodly fellowship of his episcopal colleagues and "traveling companions," and the increasingly eager
welcomes of the Churches, which are almost everywhere crowded to hear him, can hardly fail to
exhilarate him; but he becomes more punctilious and anxious about the great cause which has risen
up under his labors. He fears its " temporal" prosperity; he criticizes severely slight deviations from
traditional usage; he is alarmed at the sound of a bell in the cupola of a Methodist Church, and hopes
"it will be the last one;" he dreads, above all, the marriage of the itinerants; it seems to him to
menace almost fatally the whole ministry of Methodism in the new world. He is pleased to observe
in the extreme South a prejudice in families against the marriage of their daughters with Methodist
preachers, and says: "Thus involuntary celibacy is imposed upon us. All the better: care and anxiety
about worldly possessions do not stop us in our course, and we are saved from the pollution of Negro
slavery and oppression." He rejoices to get into the Virginia Conference, where they are nearly all
inveterate celibates. At one of its sessions, (in 1809,) among eighty-four preachers present, only three
had wives. "It was called," says Boehm, who was there, "the 'Bachelor Conference.' We had also
bachelor bishops." McKendree was with Asbury. The latter "was delighted," adds Boehm, "with the
appearance of the men. He said 'many of them are the most elegant young men I have ever seen in
features, body, and mind; they are manly, and yet meet.' He rejoices in the great prosperity of the
Church. He averages its congregations at a thousand hearers each, for many in the South and West
comprised the people for miles around the "appointments." He estimated the Methodist hearers in
Georgia, in 1806, at one hundred and thirty thousand. "It is quite probable," he says, "we congregate
two hundred thousand in each state on an average, and if to these we add those who hear us in the
two Canadian provinces, and in the Mississippi and Indiana territories, it will perhaps be found that
we preach to four millions of people. What a charge!"
Asbury's maladies are still inveterate, and he moves on only by the indomitable force of his will.
In 1805 he writes: "My eyes fail. I must keep them for the Bible and the Conferences." Boehm, with
him in the far South in 1812, says: "Never was he more feeble, never less able to travel, and yet he
would go on. There was only one thing that could stop him -- the pale horse and his rider. Having
lost the use of one of his feet by rheumatism, I had to carry him in my arms and place him in his