History Of Methodist Reform, Volume I - Media Sabda Org

career in Georgetown, D. C., at the home of George W. Haller, a sympathizing Methodist Protestant
friend, in 1834, dying peacefully, aged fifty-six years. He was buried by personal friends, after a
funeral sermon by Rev. T. H. Stockton, in the Holmstead graveyard, and a suitable slab of marble
recorded his memory. After the cemetery was removed, on the solicitation of some kind Methodists,
the philanthropist W. W. Corcoran of Washington had his remains transferred to an eligible lot in
Oak Hill Cemetery, Georgetown, D. C., and covered with the antique slab lettered more than fifty
years before. During his visit to Ireland he labored hard and was favorably received by the common
people. He returned to the United States and traveled widely as an independent itinerant, and in 1807
returned to Britain, visiting Staffordshire. He suggested to the zealous people under Clowes and the
Bournes the plan of the American camp-meeting, then in successful operation in the rural districts
of America, and officially recognized by Asbury and promoted by Snethen, one of the originators,
borrowing the hint from some Kentucky Presbyterians, who, like these English lay-preachers,
departed from church "order," and, being persuaded that they were right and favored of God,
persevered and were expelled the regular Presbyterian Church, forming the Cumberland Presbyterian
Church under a modified Calvinism.
The English camp-meetings were very popular and successful, and the religious excitement of the
early Methodists was revived in their conduct. They were criticized and attacked by the Conference
preachers. Hugh Bourne vindicated them in a pamphlet, and counter publications were issued. It
came before the Conference, and the regulars in authority pronounced that they were "highly
improper in England, and likely to be productive of considerable mischief, and we disclaim
connection with them." Hugh Bourne, who was a chapel trustee and not a local preacher, but full of
zeal and courage, traveled to and fro over several counties besides Staffordshire, arousing the people
and holding during the clement season the camp-meetings. To be recalcitrant to authority, even to
quarterly meeting authority among Methodists, is to commit unpardonable offense. It is an adage
with some people, that the worst use you can make of a man is to hang him. All history has proven
that the worst use you can make of a Methodist, either minister or layman, is to expel him for other
cause than immorality. A year after, Clowes raised his flag on Mow Hill for the first English
camp-meeting and the circumjacent people flocked to it, and, in 1808, Hugh Bourne was expelled
the Wesleyan connection by the Burslem quarterly meeting. Two years after, Clowes, who continued
to use the camp-meeting, met with a like fate. He at once gave up his temporal business and entered
upon a crusade of defense and missionary labor. Thus was organized, by the necessity of their
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situation, the Primitive Methodists in 1810. Stevens dismisses his account of the movement
without one word of disparagement, all the more creditable to him as it was a palpable case of
maladministration. At least indirectly the Deed of Declaration is again responsible for a schism in
Methodism by its sixteenth section, which invests the Wesleyan preachers of the Conference with
power to expel from the visible Church of God for any reason deemed sufficient, other than
immorality. Thus martyrs for opinions' sake are made, and their figurative blood becomes the seed
of secession and new church organizations.
A glance at the history of the Primitive Methodists. For the data recurrence is made to the
symposium in the New York Independent of March, 1891, on the Centenary of Methodism. The
sketch is furnished by Rev. D. Hallam, then President of the Primitive Conference. Hugh Bourne in
his conduct of the prayer-meetings in Staffordshire closed them at an early hour on the principle that
the wage-earner needed rest, but in the white heat of their spiritual quickening the spirit of complaint