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

HISTORY OF THE
METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH
By Abel Stevens
CHAPTER XXII
REVIEW OF THE PERIOD 1796 -- 1804
Numerical Gains -- The Ministry -- Locations -- The Local Ministry -- Joshua Marsden's Views
of American Methodism -- Itinerants who fell by the Yellow Fever -- John Dickins' Character and
Death -- Deaths of Preachers -- Geography of the Church -- Its rapid Growth, especially in the West
-- Ratio of its Growth compared with that of the Nation -- Conclusion
These eight years were the most prosperous in the history of the Church thus far, surpassing in
numerical gains any equal period. They end with more than a hundred and fifteen thousand (115,411)
[1]
members, and four hundred preachers. The denomination had gained nearly fifty-nine thousand
(58,747) communicants, and more than one hundred (107) preachers, more than doubling its
membership, and increasing its preachers by more than one third, notwithstanding the great number
of "locations," which, as has been repeatedly shown, were not real losses to the ministry, nor hardly
to the itinerancy. It gained more members in these eight years than it reported at the end of the first
twenty-four of its history. The Philadelphia Conference took the lead, numerically. It returned more
than twenty-eight thousand seven hundred (28,712;) Baltimore ranked next, and Virginia third.
The gain of a hundred and seven preachers is no indication of the actual ministerial growth of the
Church; a host of its most commanding men retired to the local ranks in these years, but still to labor
indefatigably. There were no less than two hundred and seventy-eight candidates received into full
membership by the Conferences. There were but twenty-four deaths, and six expulsions or
withdrawals; but there were two hundred and four locations, besides many who were put back into
the local ministry from a probationary relation to the Conferences. Able local preachers, many of
them veterans from the itinerancy, were now scattered over the whole country, and were among the
chief founders of the Church in new regions. They were much more numerous than the traveling
ministry. No reports of them were yet made in the statistics of the Church; but Lee, who had traveled
in all its bounds with Asbury, endeavored to ascertain their number in 1799. His estimate was
doubtless much short of the truth, but it gives eight hundred and fifty. There were then but two
hundred and sixty-nine traveling preachers. About sixty of these local evangelists were beyond the
Alleghenies. Virginia and Maryland had much more than a third of the whole number, New England
had twenty-five, and about a quarter of these were in the remote province of Maine.
Near the close of our present period a distinguished English Methodist preacher (Joshua Marsden)
visited the United States, (1802,) and has recorded his impressions of American Methodism. He
says: "Here I had an opportunity of contemplating the vast extent of the work of God in the western
world. I was greatly surprised to meet in the preachers assembled at New York such examples of
simplicity, labor, and self-denial. Some of them had come five or six hundred miles to attend the
Conference. They had little appearance of clerical costume; many of them had not a single article
of black cloth; their good bishops set them the example, neither of whom were dressed in black; but
the want of this was abundantly compensated by a truly primitive zeal in the cause of their Divine