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

ENDNOTES
1 Aaron Sandford was worthy of this peculiar distinction. He was also the first class-leader, first
steward, and first local preacher of New England Methodism. He and his wife's sister, Mrs. Hawley,
were the first two members of Lee's second class. His house sheltered the way-worn itinerants for
more than fifty years. "Here," says one of those who long knew him, "the itinerant has always found
a friend and a home; here the Christian brother has always found a kindly reception, and a
resting-place. He has lived to see the work of God spread around him, far and wide, beyond his most
enlarged expectations. He has had ten children, nine of whom have been married, and he has had the
unspeakable pleasure of seeing them all converted to God, and joined to the same Church with
himself. Three of his children have died in the faith; two of His sons, with himself, are local
preachers. He has about a dozen grandchildren, who are members of the Church, and one of them
is now actively engaged in the itinerant ministry." He became one of the wealthy men of the town,
survived, with nearly unimpaired faculties, beyond his ninetieth year, and died in the peace of the
gospel, In Reading, Conn., March 29, 1847.
2 Life of Wilbur Fisk, D. D., etc., by Joseph Holdich, D. D., p.18. New York, 1842.
3. The two portraits of him which have been engraved recall his appearance well enough to those
who were familiar with it, but can hardly afford an accurate impression to such as never saw him.
One of them, presenting him in the primitive ministerial costume of the Church, (which he doffed,
in later years,) has too much of the languor of disease. There is an aspect of debility, if not decay,
about it which did not belong to the original, notwithstanding his habitual ill-health. It is preferred,
however, by many of his friends to the second engraving, an English production, marked by ideal
exaggerations, and not a little of that exquisite and unnatural nicety with which Wesleyan preachers
are flattered in their "Magazine" portraits. There is a bust of him extant; but it is not to be looked at
by any who would not mar in their memories the beautiful and benign, image of his earlier manhood
by the disfigurations of disease and suffering.
4 Sketches and Incidents, etc., p. 342. New York, 1843.
5 See the American Travels of Miss Martineau, Buckingham, Miss Bremer, Mrs. Jameison, and
Dickens.
6 A Boston Journal, (Z. Herald, May 8, 1867,) alluding to the Methodist ministry of the city, says:
"One of their number has been the center of more idolatry on the part of the Areopagites of this
Athens, as long as his strength allowed him to preach, than any of their own gods. Horace Mann
joins in with Dr. Channing in his laudation; and the only elaborate eulogy of a minister ever drawn
from the pen of their heresiarch, Emerson, was paid to this master workman. No name in this city's
clerical annals, not that of Cotton Mather, Matthew Byles, Peter Thacher, or Lyman Beecher, will
be more historic, or more justly so, for wit, imagination, and oratory, the highest gifts of intellect,
no less than of the heart, than the name of Edward T. Taylor."
7 Bishop Clark's Life of Hedding, p. 202. New York, 1855.
8 Districts find circuits of New York Conference extended into Western New England, and render
it next to impossible to estimate correctly the Methodist statistics of the latter.