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

Asbury, in the summer of 180, wrote: "I have good reasons to believe that upon the Eastern Shore
four thousand have been converted since the first of May, and one thousand sanctified, besides souls
convicted and quickened and restored. Our Pentecost for sanctification is fully come in some places.
Ten camp-meetings north of New York in about two months, and more laid out. Now, I think, we
congregate two millions in a year, and I hope for one hundred thousand souls converted, convicted,
restored, or sanctified. The whole continent is awake. I am on a route of three thousand miles from
and to Baltimore. Such a work of God, I believe, never was known for the number of people."
Among the eminent men who entered the ministry in this period none attained a more important
historical position in the middle states than John Emory, born in Queen Anne County, Md., 1789.
His parents were Methodists, and belonged to the best class of the community. They trained him
strictly in their faith, and from his childhood he maintained an unsullied character. In his seventeenth
year he joined the Church, a consecrated youth. He was classically educated, and early devoted
himself to the profession of the law. At the time he abandoned its ambitious hopes of wealth and
honor for the Methodist itinerancy hardly any young man in his native state had more flattering
prospects. An inflexible will, the most assiduous habits of study and application, thorough manliness
and uprightness, remarkable self-possession, clearness, and comprehensiveness of mind, readiness
of speech, in style of equal perspicuity and vigor, and an extraordinary logical faculty, marked him
as a man to whom success was beyond any other hazard than that of life itself. He was not eligible
to the bar, according to usage, till his majority, but was admitted two years earlier, and soon had,
says one of his legal contemporaries, "every product of wealth and fame"' by a successful practice.
"Had he continued," says another of his legal colleagues, "he would have attained a most
conspicuous eminence." In these times, more than in ours, the law was the highway to political
distinction, and John Emory could have hopefully aimed at the highest places of public power and
fame, but his luminous mind saw the, superior honor of an apostolic life of labor and suffering, and
the "glory which shall follow." He turned away from his professional prospects. The self-denial cost
him a fearful struggle. He lost his religious comfort before he yielded; but in 1809 he made a
"covenant," wrote and signed it, to give up the law and preach the gospel. "The moment," he says,
"I entered into this covenant on my knees, I felt my mind relieved, and the peace and love of God
flow through my soul, and ever since I have enjoyed closer communion with him than ever before."
His father, though a pious man, persistently opposed his resolution, refused him a horse with which
to begin his itinerant career, and refused for two years to hear him preach, or to receive letters from
him. Borrowing a horse from a friend, he went forth, however, and traveled, "under the presiding
elder," till the session of the Philadelphia Conference in 1810, when he was received into its
membership, and sent to Caroline Circuit, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. His father at last
became reconciled to his course, encouraged his labors, and, when dying, sent for him to attend and
console his last hours. From 1810 to 1813 young Emory rode circuits, but never afterward. He was
ready for the hardest service; and when Asbury, in 1812, called for volunteers for Canada, he offered
himself for that difficult field, as also for the West. But his peculiar talents fitted him for other work.
In 1813 he was appointed to the Academy (Union) Station in Philadelphia.
In 1815 he was appointed to Wilmington, Del.; in 1816, re-appointed to Union Church in
Philadelphia, and the same year was elected a delegate to the General Conference. It was the first
session to which he was eligible, and there was no subsequent session during his life in which he was
not a delegate, except that of 1824, when, being in the minority in his Conference on a disputed