History Of Methodist Reform, Volume I - Media Sabda Org

led John Wesley Bond, his last traveling companion for two years, to nurse him like a mother nurses
her sick child and to be with him in his final hours.
Asbury carried his asceticism to the extreme of an anchorite. He rigorously fasted every Friday
and on special occasions. He was cast in the mold of Ignatius Loyola, and had he lived in the
sixteenth century might have vied with him as a leader. Indeed, it will be seen as progress is made
in his life-story that, perhaps unconsciously to himself, he exemplified and was molding his
preachers to adopt the triple vow of the Order of Jesus — poverty, chastity, and obedience. His love
of leadership and the necessities it imposed of a personal superintendency of preachers and people
scattered over thousands of miles of a wild and almost trackless territory, made its duties paramount
to every other consideration, even the appeals of nature for conjugal association, so that he not only
remained a bachelor through life, but discouraged marriage in the preachers by both his example and
precept. The poverty grew out of the straitened circumstances of the people, the obedience was a
primal law of the inchoate Church, and the chastity grew out of both these conditions. The result was
that youth and inexperience were the rule among the itinerants. A few would hold out until thirty or
forty years of age before they married, and this meant location or a narrow sphere of travel. This state
of things continued during Asbury's life. Henry Boehm cites the case of the Virginia Conference of
1809, which he attended with Asbury. It was composed of eighty-four preachers, and but three of
them married. It was no exception. He says: "It was properly called the 'Bachelor' Conference. We
also had bachelor bishops." McKendree was the associate now and he imitated Asbury in his
celibacy, but had no successor. It is open to proof that when a preacher married, unless he joined
himself to some worldly means as well, Asbury expressed his disapproval by giving him an
appointment of the scantiest living, often of necessity, but not infrequently to exhibit his
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disapprobation. It was unwholesome in every sense, but its ready obedience and self-sacrifice are
as clear as the same conditions in the Roman hierarchy, which in not a few features it so closely
followed. The people were poor, but it contradicts all that is known of human nature to conclude that
they would not have supported married men as well. The celibate life seemed the choice of the
preachers; there was a timid sensitiveness among them not to be open to the charge that they were
"preaching for money"; sixty-four dollars a year sufficed for all the material wants of the preachers,
often not more than half of it received; they had no participation in the government, so that it soon
grew upon them to believe that, as in Wesley's time, the trinity of virtues for a layman was: to pray,
pay, and obey. It was a vicious system in some of its tendencies. But the martyr-like sufferings, the
toils, the zeal, the fervid spirit, the tearful preaching of men whose convictions and experience were
as deep and solemn as the grave, condoned for these tendencies; and the circuit rider, not to say the
presiding elder and the bishop when the paternal plan crystallized, were received into the humble
homes of the people almost like messengers from another world. The Roman priest and the
Methodist preacher in this regard had no parallel, and it has not yet died out of the popular heart. He
talked religion at the fireside, and could be heard praying often at odd hours of the night. In much
it was virtue-imparting to him and virtue-inspiring to them; and in this the time never was when
Asbury could not say to the most consecrated of his helpers, "Follow me as I follow Christ." He says
in his Journal, "I have little leisure for anything but prayer; seldom more than two hours in the day,
and that space I wish to spend in retired meditation and prayer." Again, "I find it expedient to spend
an hour in prayer for myself alone; and an hour each morning and evening for all the preachers and
people." Once more, "I see the need of returning to my twelve times of prayer," and much more to
the same effect. The apostle's injunction to "Pray without ceasing " is now better understood even