History Of Methodist Reform, Volume I - Media Sabda Org

the Methodist Societies, though through all this period, say from 1770 to 1785, the doctrine of
"passive obedience and non-resistance" in the State had been repelled by the colonies until it
culminated in a revolution of blood and a finality of civil independence. Freedom from kings and
bishops was the end attained by the inchoate States of the American Union, while the enthronement
of kings and bishops was the inevitable outcome of the paternal system in the inchoate Methodist
Church within the same territorial limits. Not a few of the preachers, especially among the native
born, chafed under the Asburyan rule from the beginning. It was utterly incongruous with the free
air all about them, but they saw in their leader such an example of unfeigned piety and self-sacrifice
that they submitted for the gospel's sake, a gospel of free grace and full salvation. If any openly
demurred, it was sufficient answer that the plan was Wesleyan, it bore his credentials. Without
abandoning the contention that the doctrines and means of grace peculiar to Methodism would have
prevailed under the Divine blessing just as fully if it had been possible for Wesley and Asbury with
their rule-loving natures to have administered a more liberal polity, it detracts nothing from the
contention to admit that, accepting Abel Stevens' crystalline definition of Methodism, "A revival
church in its spirit, a missionary church in its organization," the paternal government of both Wesley
and Asbury, at least in the formative stages of the United Societies in Britain and America, was
admirable and effective. But, as has been intimated, an intimation to be followed in due course by
abundant proof, it was the ill-advised perpetuation of paternalism in the Deed of Declaration for the
former, and the purposeful perpetuation of it in the hasty organization of the Methodist Episcopal
Church for the latter, that made a Church for the ministry and not a ministry for the Church; the
scriptural, rational, and natural order. It was the will and work practically of two men, — Thomas
Coke, then but thirty-seven years of age, and Francis Asbury, but thirty-nine, and the acquiescence
of fifty-nine other preachers out of the eighty-three then in the traveling connection, most of them
mere striplings in age and experience; without consulting with the locality, now growing to the
dignity of a third estate in Methodism, or of the whole body of the laity. It shall be my task to
demonstrate that this second and aggravated departure from New Testament precedents of Church
polity is directly responsible for the many divisions of American Methodism and the perpetual
agitation against the exclusive rule of the ministerial class, who vested in themselves all legislative,
judicial, and executive powers.
The conclusion is reached, then, that the Deed of Declaration was the cardinal error of English
Methodism, in giving corporate form to an oligarchic entail of governmental power; and the
organization of the Methodist Episcopal Church was the cardinal error of American Methodism, with
a like result, greatly exaggerated. The astute Snethen has expressed this conclusion with nervous
energy: "Every matter of fact evidence, every argument 'a posteriori', goes to demonstrate that
paternal power, as soon as it ceases to be qualified by parental affection, begins to degenerate into
tyranny, and therefore ought not to be perpetuated beyond the life of the real father himself." It may
be conceded that Mr. Wesley for the United Societies of Great Britain, and Mr. Asbury for the
United Societies of North America, acting as he did by his authority as general assistant for several
years, and then by assumption, up to the Christmas Conference of 1784, governed by a plan which
was more efficient than any other could have been, in the circumstances. Snethen makes the same
concession: "It is, indeed, beyond all doubt that any leader in Church or State, with absolute
authority, can do more than if he were fettered by a system; and yet it is a universally admitted fact
that no governments are so liable to sink under their own weight as absolute ones. The ancient
Romans had their temporary dictators in the emergency of the State; but when the dictatorship