History Of Methodist Reform, Volume I - Media Sabda Org

American Methodism, and it troubled him much. Arrived at the Conference, "he talked with his
countryman, John Dickins, and found him opposed to our continuance in union with the Episcopal
Church; brothers Watters and Garrettson tried their men and found them inflexible." So it seems that
they had planned to capture the preachers in sections, a plan worthy of such a strategist as Asbury.
Brothers Watters, Garrettson, and myself stood back, and being afterward joined by brother
Dromgoole, we were desired to come in, and I was permitted to speak." Permitted to speak! How
oddly it sounds! Was he crestfallen? Never a bit. It was his golden opportunity, and he availed of it.
"I read Mr. Wesley's thoughts on separation; showed my private letters of instruction from Mr.
Wesley; set before them the sentiments of the Delaware and Baltimore Conferences; read our
epistles, and read my letter to brother Gatch, and Dickins' letter in answer."
He preaches, and like a wise builder makes no allusion to the differences. Nothing, however,
would move them, not even "letters from Mr. Wesley," chiefly, it may be opined, because they must
have been very general and unsatisfactory, as it is known they were up to this point; he was too
distracted by different stories to reach a conclusion thus early as to the disputants. "In the afternoon
we met; the preachers appeared to be farther off; there had been, I thought, some talking out of
doors." Who did this talking? Likely leading laymen made an outside lobby, for not one of them
might put his foot inside a Conference, not a local preacher, not even a preacher on trial. He offers
his ultimatum, — suspension of the ordinances for one year and submission of the matter to Wesley's
decision. In an hour they assembled again, and their answer was that "they could not submit to the
terms of union." Asbury turned away to his lodging-place "under the heaviest cloud I ever felt in
America." That his last proposal, seemingly so fair, should be rejected, was too much for him. He
fully understood that it was germinal of the whole matter, for he knew full well on general principles
what Wesley's decision would be as to separation from the Church, and it may be that a few of the
regular Conference understood it also, and hence their hesitation. James O'Kelly was there, an active
participant, and was not easily circumvented. Some years later, when his hot blood was up, he
characterized Asbury not very courteously as "a long-headed Englishman," and so he was in politer
phrase. Both parties went to praying, Asbury at his lodging-place, Watters and Garrettson "upstairs
where the Conference met," — the loft probably; the regular Conference was praying, with a result
like the prayers of chaplains in confronting armies, with a final construction that the Lord was on the
side of the heaviest guns. The next day Asbury came back to take leave of the Conference on his
return to the north, but found that "they had been brought to an agreement while I was praying." The
Lord was on his side! Gatch had probably yielded, and with him the Conference, to suspend the
ordinances and refer to Wesley, all to meet in Baltimore, in May, 1781. The letter was prepared and
sent to Wesley by John Dickins, who from this time is found ranged on the winning side. Asbury,
on reaching Petersburg, writes to Wesley, three days afterward. He returns to Maryland with the
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regular Conference in his saddle-pockets. The Manakintown Conference is no longer a lost
chapter in Methodism, but its finality must ever be regarded as its "lost opportunity." What it stood
for could not, however, be compromised or throttled in its birth. The principles involved were
undying; they live today in forms of liberal Methodism, and in a Methodist Episcopacy so revised
in structure and so broadened in administration that Asbury would not know it. The Manakintown
leaven is so working that nothing can arrest the full acknowledgment of its principles, as will be
proven from the crises which have developed from that day to the present, and a near future for the
consummation of Snethen's axiom, "I lay it down as an axiom that the religious liberty of a people
should never be reduced in principle below the standard of their civil liberty."
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