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

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peace;" Lewis Hunt, in Fleming County, Ky., in 1801, the young itinerant who followed Kobler in Ohio, and returned thence to his father's house to die of consumption, "in assured peace with God;" in 1802, in Hampshire County, Va., Edmund Wyman, who, though "much debilitated," and "apparently near his end," a year before his death, continued to travel till he could do so no more, and fell asleep in great "tranquillity;" in Gloucester, N. J., in 1802, John Leach, circumspect, "pious," "useful," a sufferer of "oppressive affliction," but who "died in great peace;" in Monmouth County, N. J., 1803, Anthony Turck, the Dutch itinerant whom we have met in the Pennsylvania Mountains, "a holy man, indefatigable, successful, subject to great afflictions," with "increasing sweetness in communion with God" toward his end, and "victory in death;" in Virginia, Nathan Jarrett, "a man of great zeal," "pleasing voice," and exceedingly affable, who, after lying insensible some time, "broke out in a rapture," singing, "Behold, the light is come! The glorious conquering King is nigh to take his exiles home," and in a few minutes fell asleep in Jesus; Rezin Cash, "a man of great solemnity of mind and goodness of heart," who "languished away," and "died in peace;" in 1804, at Ashgrove, N. Y., the scene of Embury, Bininger, and Ashton's last years, David Brown, a devout Irishman, who fell there laboring for the Church in the wilderness, dying in "a floodtide of joy," and uttering, as his last words, "My anchor is cast within the vail." The General Conference of 1804 defined, and published in the Discipline, the boundaries of the Annual Conferences. They show the enlarged geography of the Church. 1. The New England Conference includes the District of Maine, and the Boston, New London and Vermont Districts. 2. The New York Conference comprehends the New York, Pittsfield, Albany, and Upper Canada Districts. 3. The Philadelphia Conference includes the remainder of the state of New York, all New Jersey, that part of Pennsylvania which lies on the east side of the Susquehanna River, except what belongs to the Susquehanna District, the state of Delaware, the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and all the rest of the peninsula. 4. The Baltimore Conference comprises the remainder of Pennsylvania, the Western Shore of Maryland, the Northern Neck of Virginia, and the Greenbrier District. 5. The Virginia Conference includes all that part of Virginia which lies on the south side of the Rappahannock River, and east of the Blue Ridge, and all that part of North Carolina which lies on the north side of Cape Fear River, except Wilmington; also the circuits on the branches of the Yadkin. 6. The South Carolina Conference comprehends the remainder of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. 7. The Western Conference includes the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio, and that part of Virginia which lies west of "the great river Kanawha, with the Illinois and the Natchez."
Methodism was now entrenched in every state of the Union, and was penetrating every one of its opened territories. The few itinerants who had followed Gibson to the Natchez country invaded West Florida and East Louisiana. The germs of Churches now obscurely planted in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, were never to die, but to yield, in our day, the mighty harvest of 116,000 members and 600 preachers in Ohio; 90,000 members and 450 preachers in Indiana; 90,000 members and 560 preachers in Illinois; and to spread out sheltering boughs over all the West to the northern lakes and the Pacific coast. We shall hereafter see the yet feeble forces of Western Methodism, hitherto so scattered that we have hardly been able to make anything like adherent record of them, consolidated into thirty-five powerful Conferences, with three thousand itinerants, and half a million communicants, aside from the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and all other branches of the [3] denomination. Though it began in the West nearly a quarter of a century after its beginning in the East, and was yet in the former but a dispersed and struggling band, it was destined to embody, in its ultramontane Conferences by our day, fully one half of its ministerial strength, and to move forward in the van of all the other Protestant Christianity of the Valley of the Mississippi. But in all other sections of the Republic, not excepting New England, the inherent vitality and progressive energy of Methodism had now become indisputable, and it was henceforward to advance with a celerity [speed -- DVM] unknown to any other form of Christianity in the nation. In the last decade of the last century (1790 -- 1800) the ratio of the increase of the population of the United States was 35.02 per cent., that of Methodism, meanwhile, was but 12.60 per cent; but this disproportion between the growth of the nation and the denomination was to cease for our age, if not [4] forever, with the close of the eighteenth century. Excepting the periods of the secession of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and of the southern Rebellion, the ratio of the increase of the Church has far outsped that of the nation. Even dating from 1790, and making no allowance for these two formidable drawbacks, the average ratio of the increase of the Methodist Episcopal Church has been, down to our day, (1865,) 56.85 per cent. For each ten years, while that of the population of the republic has been 35.82 per cent. The Church has led the nation at the rate of twenty-three per cent. Each decade. And yet this statement, applying only to the Methodist Episcopal Church, gives no adequate estimate of the incredible vigor of Methodism, for about half its numerical force in the United States is outside of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The astonishing gains of the latter have been made in spite of secessions, (averaging about one for every fifteen years,) by which half the actual strength of American Methodism stands organized beyond its ecclesiastical lines, though identical with it in doctrine and internal discipline, and nearly so in ecclesiastical economy. We stand, then, at present (1804) in a most interesting stage of its progress, about midway of the decade in which, after faltering long, in the ratio of its growth, behind that of the country, it was about to wheel from its position in the rear and advance with its triumphant banner to the front, not only of all other denominations, but of the nation itself, in the ratio of its increase; and thenceforward, for good or ill, lead the Christianity of the North American continent, adding to its ranks an annually masses of population which not only astonished its own humble laborers, but the Christian world, and sometimes, in a single year, exceeded the entire membership of denominations which had been in the field generations before it. At such a crisis, the detail with which I have thus far recorded the early history of this curious and important religious development, will not perhaps appear irrelevant, for it is by such facts, showing its genetic conditions, but too often ignored in history, that we are to learn its true genius and probable destiny, and unfold, to its present and future
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WESLEYAN HERITAGE Library HISTORY O
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HISTORY of the METHODIST EPISCOPAL
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BOOK VI CHAPTER I = PART 58 METHODI
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CHAPTER IX = PART 66 METHODISM IN T
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CHAPTER XV = PART 72 REVIEW OF THE
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disappearance of Coke, Asbury, What
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convened, a second time, in Wilbrah
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yet I did not go out that year; but
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He returned again to New Jersey in
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Asbury pressed on westward with his
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congregation, and meanwhile advanci
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direction of the presiding elder, G
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traveled in Massachusetts, Rhode Is
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knowledge. His judgment was always
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He did great services and endured g
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of the itinerants. There was no one
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found adequate to the singular exig
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as a sail in a leaking canoe, and p
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[16] of his decease, sent home for
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passing through small villages; but
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HISTORY OF THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL
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God. The Scotchman could endure it
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[7] Conference till the next year.
Page 47 and 48: y his own hands, and his furniture
Page 49 and 50: there were three circuits, with thr
Page 51 and 52: performed incredible labors and tra
Page 53 and 54: Before he reached the last stanza h
Page 55 and 56: "in the wilds of Virginia, where he
Page 57 and 58: ed, and trembling with agitation. E
Page 59 and 60: this melancholy record. I never rea
Page 61 and 62: at Cabbin Creek, Ky., twenty thousa
Page 63 and 64: in that vast wilderness, and had no
Page 65 and 66: poles. This was their bedstead. Som
Page 67 and 68: Benjamin Lakin, Samuel Doughty John
Page 69 and 70: Gibson. "Here," say his brethren, "
Page 71 and 72: of the Little Miami River. On Thurs
Page 73 and 74: Circuit) for this year began at Moo
Page 75 and 76: Sale, J. Oglesby; Guyandotte, Asa S
Page 77 and 78: worst for stealing, fighting, and l
Page 79 and 80: twentieth they reached the scene of
Page 81 and 82: the toil and sufferings, of another
Page 83 and 84: ENDNOTES 1 See Extracts by Bishop M
Page 85 and 86: 37 Rev. Dr. Trimble's Address at Oh
Page 87 and 88: my father's neighborhood. The Confe
Page 89 and 90: attempted also to make local preach
Page 91 and 92: tireless apostle completed by the n
Page 93 and 94: to prepare forms of petition to the
Page 95 and 96: HISTORY OF THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL
Page 97: a change which it has always since
Page 101 and 102: ENDNOTES 1 Bangs, (II, p. 171,) fol
Page 103 and 104: Methodists in other places, and wis
Page 105 and 106: are reported from Flint Circuit. Th
Page 107 and 108: Russell, fallen as he was from the
Page 109 and 110: ENDNOTES 1 Bangs, ii, 194. Dunwody'
Page 111 and 112: intensely bright by the grateful jo
Page 113 and 114: eached the furthest end of the piaz
Page 115 and 116: his humble shed and the chancel whe
Page 117 and 118: class-meetings, and to no small ext
Page 119 and 120: 1 Minutes, 1858. ENDNOTES 2 Rev. Dr
Page 121 and 122: grandchildren were gay and playful;
Page 123 and 124: in a swamp on the Waccamaw Lake, a
Page 125 and 126: ENDNOTE 1 A few months ago, accompa
Page 127 and 128: Asbury, in the summer of 180, wrote
Page 129 and 130: means by which this necessary objec
Page 131 and 132: I should have to preach, but determ
Page 133 and 134: themselves, it was resolved that th
Page 135 and 136: ENDNOTES 1 Bangs, though his narrat
Page 137 and 138: directions, preaching as far as Buf
Page 139 and 140: and in the States, from the Ulster
Page 141 and 142: Conference sent over three missiona
Page 143 and 144: 1814 Michael Coate, of New Jersey,
Page 145 and 146: 1 Peck's "Early Methodism," p. 158.
Page 147 and 148: limits, when it will devolve upon t
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That very significant and convenien
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Channing, the elder Beecher, Wainwr
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in the eyes of the people, and grea
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own souls, because ye were dear unt
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Early in the spring of 1808 he retu
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seventeen preachers upon trial. The
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this meeting. Monday, 22d, I turned
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strengthened the whole denomination
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savage men, and venomous serpents."
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indescribable. At one time I saw at
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extraordinary learning, of tireless
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oom; but, finding there no means of
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By the end of our present period th
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some sixty or seventy souls. They a
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stacked away at the end of the cour
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olled over the whole Conference." H
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ashamed of yourselves?' which only
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living; I have outlived every membe
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iographer of the itinerant. Born in
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gentleman. While the circles of fas
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His itinerant ministry in the West
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took a prominent part in the great
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to the people, and to go back to Na
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country. These were about to return
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of preachers had increased thirty-f
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1 Rev. F. C. Holliday, in Sprague,
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Astonishing, superhuman almost, as
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of "through the interior of Louisia
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their children. In ten years, I thi
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hates the nefarious practice. In th
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These extraordinary facts excited n
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15 I must remind the reader that I
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[3] and threatened to return home.
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he prepared for South Carolina, wit
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the expediency of increasing the nu
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1 General Conference Journal,, vol.
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itinerants he said, "See that every
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In our day (1866) the Methodist Boo
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edifice was soon after provided in
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in both hemispheres, and which prop
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even romantic record, but our limit
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He organized the Liberia Mission. H
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and the moral prospects of the worl
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ut we may well hesitate to admit th
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They preached and suffered in Engla
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ENDNOTES 1 An error in the Minutes
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and great labors; his charity, his
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directing the advancing Church with
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history, and presents, in full vita
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