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

majority of votes in all; the Minutes of all appeared still, in print, as the records of but one
conference; and their enactments were from time to time inserted in the Discipline without reference
to where or how they were enacted. Now it so happened that the Baltimore session for 1787 was the
last session for that year, (Lee's Hist., p. 124,) and therefore its reported doings were given as the
results of all the sessions of the year; that is to say, not of a General Conference, but of the
Conferences generally. I am also of the opinion, from scattered allusions in contemporary books, that
not a few important measures, applying to the whole Church, were decided sometimes by one or two
of the principal conferences, (like that of Baltimore, Philadelphia, or New York,) without reference
to the remoter sessions. In fact the Church was yet in its forming process, and, like an army on the
march or in the field, was not very fastidious about questions of law. If the Baltimore sessions of
1787 and 1788 should be considered General Conferences, because of their important or general
enactments, so then should that of Charleston, South Carolina, of 1789 (then on the southern frontier
of the Church) for its doings about the Book Concern, "the College," the famous "Council,"
Sunday-schools, etc., and also that of 1785, which suspended the anti-slavery law of the Church.
4. Jesse Lee, the contemporary historian of the denomination, was at the sessions of 1787 and
1788, and was stationed in Baltimore in the interval of these sessions, and yet he nowhere speaks of
them as General Conferences, but numbers them and reports them among the other annual sessions.
This was an unpardonable oversight in the first historian of the Church, if they were General, not
Annual Conferences. * (a)
5. But Lee, on the other hand, distinctly names the session of 1792 as "the first regular General
Conference." If it be replied, that he meant, by the "first regular" session, only that it was the first
of the series which, from 1792, met regularly every four years, but that the session in question was
an irregular one, the rejoinder might properly be that there was no reason for any such
discrimination, for the session in question (especially as adjourned to 1788) was held at the same
distance of time before 1792 as the session of 1796 was after it. Other contemporary writers
uniformly speak of the session of 1792 as "the first General Conference." * (b)
6. "Straws show which way the wind blows," says the familiar maxim; and sometimes, when the
air is too still for any more conspicuous indicator to show its course, a feather, by its very lightness,
can decide the question. There is a brief clause in Asbury's Journals which I think has a similar
significance in the present case. We have seen that when Coke arrived in Charleston, South Carolina,
in 1787, from the West Indies, on his way to the supposed General Conference, he was "very coolly"
received by Asbury. Now it so happened that when James O'Kelly withdrew from the Church, five
years later, in his pamphlet against Asbury he accused the bishop of all sorts of maladministration,
etc., and among other charges said that he treated Coke at his arrival in Charleston with excessive
"sharpness." About fourteen years after the alleged General Conference, Asbury, in noticing this
pamphlet, says, "There was no sharpness at all upon my side with Dr. Coke, at Charleston, respecting
the proposed General Conference, (which was afterward held in 1792.) I was fully convinced that
nothing else would finish the unhappy business with O'Kelly, and that did finish It." * (c)
Evidently, then, Coke's "proposed General Conference" was not held in 1787 or 1788, but
"afterward, in 1792." The session of 1792 was therefore not only "the first regular," but also the