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

HISTORY OF
THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH
By Abel Stevens
VOLUME III
PREFACE
THOMAS L. RUSHMORE, ESQ.
My Dear Sir: I submit to you the third installment of my narrative of the History of the Methodist
Episcopal Church. The name of your family appears honorably in its pages, connected with one of
its most interesting episodes, the introduction of Methodism into Canada. Many of its subjects have
been meditated under the summer shelter of your trees, and its labor has been relieved by neighborly
attentions which will ever associate the memory of your family with my task.
In the two preceding volumes I have recorded the planting of the Church, and sufficiently defined
its theological and ecclesiastical systems; in the present the story proceeds directly along its
chronological line, suspended somewhat abruptly for the convenient size of the volume, but
continued, with no further interruption, in the next, which is now passing through the press. Some
important questions and topics, requiring more classified treatment, I have reserved for distinct
chapters in the fourth volume, though they receive passing notice at their proper dates in the
narrative.
Many difficulties, some insuperable ones, have beset my labors. While we have abundant and
well-verified documents for particular sections of the Church, for others, not less important, we have
hardly any. Of some early preachers we have more or less ample biographies; of others, and of not
a few who were chieftains of the cause, we have but scattered notices, incapable of being wrought
into satisfactory sketches. I have done the best I could, perhaps all that any pen can now or ever do,
to present these cases in their proper historical positions. Many an evangelist, who labored as an
apostle, or died as a martyr, in the early itinerancy, but whose name has been almost lost in the
oblivion of our first traditions, reappears in my humble record in heroic but unexaggerated
proportions; yet of some of the noblest characters we can catch but glimpses, sufficient to show that
they were men of genuine greatness, but insufficient to satisfy our interest for them. In the first two
volumes I have given some space, however small, to almost every preacher recorded in the
Conference Minutes of his day. In this, many a once eminent name can hardly be more than
mentioned; some, however, which may here seem to be ignored, will appear at more apposite points
of the narrative in the fourth volume.
These volumes will have at least one peculiarity -- the history of American Methodism will appear
in them mostly, if not entirely, new; for our historical publications have not heretofore attempted any
such minute record. Precisely for this reason will my attempt be liable to criticism. It is impossible
that a first endeavor of the kind can be entirely correct. I expect, and shall gratefully receive, new
names and facts, perhaps important corrections, from many, and especially from the remoter portions
of our Church territory. However serious may be the deficiencies of these pages, I venture to hope