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

In the remainder of the period Asbury, accompanied by Whatcoat, made repeated tours through
the Eastern States, penetrating to the Interior of Maine. Their visits were high festivals to the young
Churches, and the Conference sessions, especially, were jubilees. Lee also, in the summer of 1800,
reentered the great field for the last time, except a hasty visit some eight years later. It was his
general leave-taking. He passed through its whole extent into Canada, and back by the Hudson,
preaching farewell sermons amid the benedictions and tears of the people. His fellow-laborers and
fellow-sufferers in the itinerancy parted with him, from place to place, with the deepest feeling, as
from a hero who had led them to victory, and had secured for them the hard-fought field. During this
circuitous and rapid journey his preaching averaged more than one sermon a day; he was continually
occupied also in social prayer and counsels with the societies. He now leaves New England to pursue
his evangelic course, with unabated heroism, in other sections. The foundations of Methodism had
been laid by him in all the Eastern States; a large Conference had been organized; chapels had sprung
up; powerful ministry was moving to and fro, proclaiming the "great salvation through extended but
organized circuits, and thousands of converts were recorded on the roll of the Church. A great work
had been achieved, and a great man had left his stamp upon the ecclesiastical history of all New
England. His name, until recently, has been but little noted beyond the pale of his own denomination;
but his instrumentality is developing broader and broader results as time elapses, and the future
ecclesiastical historian of these Eastern States will place him among the foremost men of their
religious annals.
The remaining four years were abundant in itinerant reinforcements; but most of them, with others
heretofore omitted, will more conveniently come under notice in future parts of our narrative: Daniel
Fidler, a laborer from Virginia and the Redstone country, to Nova Scotia, and at last a patriarch of
the New Jersey Conference; Ebenezer F. Newhall, an apostle of those memorable times; Philip
Munger and Asa Heath, veterans of Maine Conference; Asa Kent, a patriarch of Providence
Conference, and indeed of all New England, still remembered by many for the sanctity of his life,
his small stature, halting gait, wenned neck, and grave aspect, a man without a particle of humor, yet
looked upon by his brethren, many of the best of whom were radiant with it, with kindliness, though
not unmixed with apparent wonder and perplexity; Samuel Hillman, long a hard worker in Maine;
Oliver Beale, a saint in the calendar of the Church; and many others equally worthy.
Thomas Branch was now a faithful and eminent itinerant, whose health broke down at last under
the severities of the climate. He proposed to go to the southwest, and labor, while his dwindling
strength should last, in the Western Conference, the only Conference then beyond the Alleghenies.
Besides the various choice of climate which this immense field afforded, there was, to the devoted
mind of Branch, an heroic if not romantic attraction in its adventurous life, and the triumph with
which the itinerant ministry was prevailing in its wildernesses. He took leave of his Eastern brethren
in much debility, and departed on horseback, with the usual itinerant accompaniment, the saddlebags
for his few books and rations, to penetrate through the forests to Marietta, on the Ohio. He never
arrived, however. On passing from the western wilds of New York, down toward Ohio, along the
southern shore of Lake Erie, he disappeared. News came at last that he had died somewhere among
the log-cabins in the then remote forest of the northwestern angle of Pennsylvania; but even this
vague information reached not most of those to whom he was dear in New England till fifteen years
later, when one of his old fellow-laborers at the East, who had, meanwhile, been elevated to the
episcopacy, was pursuing his official visitations at the West, and accidentally discovering the place