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

direction of the presiding elder, George Pickering, was Sandwich, Mass., instead of Martha's
Vineyard, to which the Conference sent me. This was a two weeks' circuit. The Sabbath
appointments were Sandwich Town and Monument. The societies were small, and the
encouragement but little, the germ only of the present state of things there. After laboring there about
three months, the presiding elder directed me to Hawke, now Danville, in the southeasterly part of
New Hampshire, where there were no Methodist Churches formed; but the ground had been partially
broken up by George Pickering, Ralph Williston, John Nichols, and perhaps others. Epaphras Kibby
was also sent into that country about the same time, but he labored principally in Poplin and East
Kingston. He occasionally visited me and I him. We tried to encourage and assist each other in our
hard labors and privations. We had been there but a few months before the Lord blessed our efforts,
and a class was formed first in Hawke and then in Poplin, and at a later period in East Kingston.
At the next Conference, which was in Lynn, June, 1800, he was ordained a deacon by Bishop
Whatcoat, and stationed on Norridgewock Circuit, in the district of Maine. That circuit included the
towns of Starks, Norridgewock, Canaan, Fairfield, Anson, and the settlements then called Industry,
New Portland, Barnardstown, Carryatuck Falls, etc. He also visited Vassalborough, and preached
there once or twice. "I went," he says, "very reluctantly to the circuit, having heard a great many
frightful stories about the country. Setting aside the disgrace of it, perhaps I should have felt but little
worse if I had been doomed to the state prison for a year. But we do not always know what is best
for us. It proved to be one of the happiest and most prosperous years of my ministerial life. There
was a good revival in Norridgewock and in Industry. I left the circuit with reluctance, 'sorrowing
most of all' that probably 'I should see their faces no more.' "
At the Conference which sat in Lynn, 1801, he was appointed to labor in Salisbury and parts
adjacent; also in 1802, in the same regions. In 1803 he was stationed in Marblehead, and in 1804 in
Hawke and vicinity. His labors extended also to Salem, in New Hampshire. At the next Conference,
1805, he was stationed in Lynn, Mass., and preached in the old Lee meeting-house, which stood at
the east end of the Common. The established Church of the village had not yet relented in its
hostility, and menaces of a prosecution had been uttered against his predecessor, Peter Jayne, for
marrying one or more couples, members of his own congregation. Asbury took measures, in the
appointment of Webb, to meet this embarrassing difficulty by imitating some of the forms of a
"regular settlement." "He told the Church," says Webb, "that he had appointed me to be their pastor.
They signified their acceptance of me as such, and he gave me a charge and token of fellowship."
Afterward the preachers stationed in Boston and Marblehead, with their people, went through similar
ceremonies, and the objections to the legality of marriage, solemnized by Methodist ministers,
ceased.
He continued in Lynn two years, and at the Conference in Boston, 1807, was appointed, with
George Pickering, to that city. The Conference rose on Saturday, and he returned immediately to his
family at Lynn. Asbury also went thither. Early the next morning a committee, consisting of three
of the chief men of the Boston Church, arrived to remonstrate with the bishop against the
substitution of Webb in the place of Merwin, who had been in the city the preceding year. "It will
not do," replied the bishop; "Merwin will die if he stays there; he must go to Newport." The
committee returned in no very agreeable mood. At first Webb was reluctantly received; "but," he
says, "Pickering and I went to our work with one heart, and hand in hand. He was foremost in every