History Of Methodist Reform, Volume I - Media Sabda Org

showed, in feasting at high dinners where expensive wines were served his close Conference friends
and official associates. He was expelled; so the Conference purged itself of its virtue and its vice
alike — the detectives and the detected were both pronounced guilty. It is not affirmed that the body
made no distinction between moral turpitude and official contumacy, but it is one of the intrinsic
weaknesses of the parental system under close corporation auspices, that it makes slow discovery
of misdemeanors in its agents and often in its haste punishes those who are friendly to discovery of
wrong-doing. Instances might be multiplied. One will be cited in its proper connection of the same
moral complexion, but of greater damage, in the history of the Book Concern of Northern Episcopal
Methodism. The Conference adjourned after issuing an address to the United Societies, in which the
best construction possible is put upon their action with assurances of more careful administration
of the temporal affairs, but admonitory also not to sympathize with the expelled or further their
methods of reform.
As never before under the fly-sheet controversy, the whole denomination was convulsed from
center to circumference. The laity now rose up and demanded participation, at least in the
temporalities, such as would make impossible such fraud and scandal as had developed. The
expelled and the censured were centers of interrogation and sympathy. They were requested to tell
all they knew, and meetings were held by the laity, the public often taking part as in a common cause
for honest methods and that fair play which always appeals to a free-born Englishman. In the town
hall of Birmingham, holding six thousand persons, a meeting was called to hear the expelled give
their version of the dispute, and it was filled to overflowing. After hearing the case the meeting
unanimously, except a few Wesleyan preachers who had come that they might report proceedings,
passed a resolution the sum of which is, that the action of the Conference in the expulsion of Everett,
Griffith, and Dunn was "a gross violation of New Testament principles." It was a sample of
numerous other meetings, larger and smaller, all over the kingdom through which the pent-up
indignation expended itself. The secular papers took it up and almost without exception sided with
the expelled. The Dissenters and their periodicals took part arrayed on the same side. Meanwhile,
blind to the popular sentiment, the Conference authorities exercised discipline upon the offenders.
The local preachers came forward and asserted themselves. An Association for Mutual Aid was
formed in London, six hundred being present at the organization. Four hundred lay delegates met
in London, April 14, 1850, to consider the situation. Then expulsions of the local preachers began,
a Mr. Heritage being the first to undergo discipline. The London Wesleyan Times was established
and grew in circulation as the organ of the Reformers. A fund was raised for the support of the
expelled. Finally, around them immense secessions gathered, and the Free Methodist denomination
crystallized with a loss to the parent body, as the outcome of the whole controversy, of one hundred
thousand members, or approximating one-third of the English Methodists. It may be safely estimated
that a large number, while approving the movement, for the cogent reasons always operating in such
emergencies, remained with the old body in silent submission. Their final union with the other
smaller secedent bodies of like polity and views, in 1857, has already been noticed. Granting all that
may be alleged for the Conference party, such a movement as this against it stands as an
impeachment of its methods and of the Deed of Declaration which made possible such an oligarchy
in the Church of Christ.
After this review of British Methodism, it is for the impartial reader to decide whether or not the
first fundamental has been sustained; to wit, that the Deed of Declaration was the cardinal error of