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

directing the advancing Church with the skill and authority of a great captain. Beginning his itinerant
ministry in England when but seventeen years of age, he came to America in his twenty-sixth year,
was ordained bishop of the church when thirty-nine years old, when it comprised less than fifteen
thousand members, and but about eighty preachers, and fell in his seventy-first year, commanding
an army of more than two hundred and eleven thousand Methodists, and more than seven hundred
itinerant preachers. It has been estimated that in his American ministry he preached about sixteen
thousand five hundred sermons, or at least one a day, and traveled about two hundred and seventy
thousand miles, or six thousand a year; that he presided in no less than two hundred and twenty-four
annual Conferences, and ordained more than four thousand preachers. He was, in fine, one of those
men of extraordinary, of anomalous greatness, in estimating whom the historian is compelled to use
terms which would be irrelevant, as hyperbole, to most men with whom he has to deal. His
discrimination of character was marvelous; his administrative talents would have placed him, in civil
government or in war, by the side of Richelieu or Caesar, and his success placed him unquestionably
at the head of the leading characters of American ecclesiastical history. No one man has done more
for Christianity in the western hemisphere. His attitude in the pulpit was solemn and dignified, if not
graceful; his voice was sonorous and commanding, and his discourses were often attended with
bursts of eloquence "which spoke a soul full of God, and, like a mountain torrent, swept all before
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it." With Wesley, Whitefield, and Coke, he ranks as one of the four greatest representative men of
the Methodistic movement. In American Methodism he ranks immeasurably above all his
contemporaries and successors. Notwithstanding his advanced age and shattered health he continued
his travels to the last, as we have seen, till he had to be aided up the pulpit steps, and to sit while
preaching.
We last took leave of him in the West, some six months before he died, when he wrote: "My eyes
fail I will resign the stations to Bishop McKendree I will take away my feet." Thence he journeyed
southward, suffering from influenza, which resulted in pulmonary ulceration and consumption. He
endeavored to advance northward, to meet, once more, the General Conference at Baltimore,
preaching continually on the way. While passing through Virginia he wrote: "I die daily -- am made
perfect by labor and suffering, and fill up still what is behind. There is no time, no opportunity to
take medicine in the day; I must do it at night. I am wasting away with a constant dysentery and
cough." In the last entry of his journal (save a single sentence) he says: "My consolations are great.
I live in God from moment to moment -- broken to pieces." He reached Richmond, Va., and at three
o'clock Sunday afternoon, March 24, 1816, preached there in the old Methodist church his last
sermon. He was carried to and from the pulpit, and sat while preaching. His faithful traveling
companion, Bond, took him to Spottsylvania, where he failed rapidly, and on Sunday 21st, expired,
raising both his bands, when unable to speak, in affirmative reply to an inquiry respecting his trust
and comfort in Christ.
His remains were disinterred, and borne to Baltimore, at the ensuing General Conference, where,
with public solemnities, a sermon from McKendree, and an immense procession, they were laid to
rest beneath the altar of Eutaw Street Church.
In that procession, including all the General Conference, and hundreds of other clergymen from
the city and neighboring churches, walked Jesse Lee. Thrift, his biographer, who was by his side,
says, "The scene was solemn and impressive; Lee's countenance bespoke his emotions. A dignified