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

eceived me, and to whom I ministered in their humble dwellings. No doubt I have taken some of
these ministers in my arms, and dedicated them to God in holy baptism; and on some of them I have
laid my hand in consecrating them to the sacred office and work of the ministry. O! why should my
heart yield to fear? The Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is yet our help."
As a preacher he was very instructive, and not infrequently exceedingly powerful; when, himself
"overwhelmed with his subject, manifestly endued with power from on high, and a sacred unction
and divine influence accompanying every sentence, the enchained multitude stood in solemn awe,
till finally the awful silence was broken by a sudden outburst of the groans and cries of sinners, and
joyful acclamations of Christians from all parts of the densely crowded congregation."
There was a deep vein of poetry in his nature. He loved the great bards, and his sermons abounded
in fine citations from them. His manners showed a singular blending of dignity and amenity, the
truest style of the real gentlemen; solemnity and pathos characterized him in his religious exercises;
his form was manly, nearly six feet in height, and well proportioned; his forehead prominent and
broad; his eyes dark, deeply set, and shaded by heavy brows.
Lasley Matthews was also a pioneer itinerant of these times, an Irishman, and a papist, who had
served in the Revolutionary war. While in camp, he was associated with Chieuvrant, who himself
had been a papist, but who now read to his comrade a small Bible which he carried in his pocket, and
thus led him to a religious life. Both became zealous preachers and founders of the Church in the
West. We have met Chieuvrant repeatedly, and seen him last preaching in moccasins and pursuing
with his rifle the murderous Indians on the Monongahela, a brave man as well as a devoted
evangelist. Matthews began to travel in 1780, and preached during twenty-seven years, mostly in the
hardest parts of the work. After doing chivalric service he was crowned with a fitting victory. He
died in 1818, on his way to meet his brethren in Conference. "When," wrote one of his friends, "he
could no longer articulate, by putting my ear to his lips, I could hear him attempting to say, 'Glory!
Praise him! My Jesus come!' " [4]
Thornton Flemming had charge of the district in 1801. Born in Virginia in 1764, he joined the
Methodists in about his twentieth year, and the itinerancy in his twenty-fourth year, and continued
to labor with his might through a ministry of more than fifty-seven years; part of the time in Virginia,
on some of its most mountainous circuits; part as presiding elder among the Tioga and Wyoming
Mountains and New York interior lakes, where we have already met him; but most of the time in the
ultra-Allegheny region of Pennsylvania, where he did much to found the Pittsburgh and Erie
Conferences, and was one of the first members of the former. For fifteen years he filled the laborious
office of presiding elder. He was to suffer much, and perish at last, by a cancer in his left eye, but
to die in the assured hope of the gospel, the oldest member of the Pittsburgh Conference, a man "of
rare endowments" and distinguished usefulness. [5]
Asa Shinn now also appears in the Redstone Circuit, a man of more than ordinary historic
importance in the Church, who will claim our attention in some future and momentous events. We
have already seen him struggling, in the western woods, for intellectual and moral improvement,
under the aid of Quinn, and beginning to preach "before he had ever seen a meeting-house or a
[6]
pulpit." He began to itinerate in 1800, on Pittsburgh Circuit, though he was not received in the