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

and great labors; his charity, his love of God and man, in all its effects, tempers, words, and actions;
bearing, with resignation and patience, great temptations, bodily labors, and inexpressible pain. In
life and death he was placid and calm. As he lived, so he died."
He was thirty-seven years an itinerant preacher, twenty-two of them in America, six in the
episcopate, and died aged seventy. He was buried under the altar of Dover Wesley Chapel, where
he had often preached with tears and with power, and where for years his name, inscribed on stone,
was a spell of influence to all in the congregation who had known him. [4]
We have witnessed Coke's final departure from the United States in 1804. On his return to
England he was made president (in 1805) of the Wesleyan Conference. I have elsewhere recorded,
[5]
somewhat in detail, his subsequent and sublime life, and have attempted to delineate in the present
work his extraordinary character and labors. After his last visit to this country he seemed, for nine
years, almost ubiquitous in the United Kingdom, administering the affairs of the Wesleyan Church,
founding and conducting its Irish, its Welsh, its "Domestic," and its Foreign Missions, virtually
embodying in his own person the whole missionary enterprise of English Methodism. When an old
man of nearly seventy years he conceived the project of introducing Methodism into Asia. He
presented himself before the British Conference, and, against great opposition, entreated, with tears,
to be sent as a missionary to India, offering to defray the expenses of himself and seven chosen
colleagues. The Conference could not resist his appeal, and at length, on the 30th of December,
1813, he departed with his little band, consisting of nine persons besides himself, (two of them wives
of missionaries,) in a fleet of six Indiamen. Terrible gales swept over them. In the Indian Ocean his
health rapidly declined. On the morning of the third of May, 1814, his servant knocked at his cabin
door to awake him at his usual time, but heard no response. Opening the door he beheld the lifeless
body of the missionary extended on the floor. A "placid smile was upon his countenance." He was
cold and stiff, and must have died before midnight. It is supposed that he had risen to call for help,
and fell by apoplexy. His cabin was separated by only a thin wainscot from others, in which no noise
or struggle had been heard, and it is inferred that he died without violent suffering. Consternation
spread among the missionary band, but they lost not their resolution. They prepared to commit him
to the deep, and to prosecute, as they might he able, his great design. A coffin was made, and at five
o'clock in the afternoon the corpse was solemnly borne up to the leeward gangway, where it was
covered with signal flags; the soldiers were drawn up in rank on the deck; the bell of the ship tolled,
and the crew and passengers, deeply affected, crowded around the scene. One of the missionaries
read the burial service, and the moment that the sun sank below the Indian Ocean the coffin was cast
into its depths. He died in his sixty-seventh year. Though the great leader was no more, his spirit
remained; and the East Indian Missions of Methodism, "presenting in our day a state of massive
strength and inexpressible utility," sprang from the fatal voyage.
The news of his death struck a sensation through all the Methodist world. He was commemorated
in funeral sermons in the principal Methodist churches of America. Asbury preached them in all his
routes, before the assembled preachers, in Conference, and pronounced him a man "of blessed mind
and soul; a gentleman, a scholar, and a bishop, and as a minister of Christ, in zeal, in labors, and in
services, the greatest man in the last century."