History Of Methodist Reform, Volume I - Media Sabda Org

employing the terms "superintendent" and "bishop," as synonymous, then there is but one way to
rescue his memory from an indelible blot, and that is the one accepted by his brother Charles —
senility. For, despite the precautions of secrecy, what was done soon became known. Charles
Wesley, who was in Bristol at the time, but in utter ignorance of the proceedings, gave vent to his
indignation in no measured words. Pathetically, he said, having assumed this view:—
"'Twas age that made the breach, not he."
He lampooned the act in stinging words in meter:—
"So easily are bishops made
By man or woman's whim;
Wesley his hands on Coke hath laid,
But who laid hands on him?"
And when he heard of the ordination of Asbury by Coke, he lost sight of Christian charity and was
guilty of satirizing the act in the quatrain — an unpardonable allusion to the humble origin of
Asbury:"—
A Roman emperor, 'tis said,
His favorite horse a consul made;
But Coke brings greater things to pass,
He makes a bishop of an ass."
Charles Wesley's almost desperate resort, that of a second childhood, to account for what seemed
to him a most erratic proceeding of his brother, not only in the setting apart, or ordination, as it was
at first commonly believed, of Whatcoat and Vasey, as elders or presbyters, but of Coke as a Bishop,
cannot be received, and is not by any class of disputants over the affair; nor is it borne out by the
facts in the case. The logical form of the question shuts up, then, to the conclusion: Wesley did not
use the form of the National Church, except it may be a memoriter use of the prayers, and did not
in any ecclesiastical sense set apart Coke as a Bishop. All Wesley's after explanations of what he did
make this plain. Whatcoat has furnished the key to it when he says, "They [Wesley, Creighton, and
Coke] formed themselves into a Presbytery." In casting about in his reading of ancient Church
history Wesley found his justification. In the letter-controversy that followed with his brother
Charles, the memorable sentence occurs that puts the matter in a nutshell: "I firmly believe that I am
a scriptural 'episcopos' as much as any man in England, or in Europe; for the uninterrupted
succession I know to be a fable, which no man ever did or can prove. But this does in no wise
prevent my remaining in the Church of England, from which I have no more desire to separate than
I had fifty years ago." That is, as a presbyter I have a right to ordain presbyters, and as superintendent
of the Methodists I am an episcopos, that is, a presiding presbyter, and this is what I did when I set
apart Coke for America. In subjection to me I appointed him a superintendent for America and
authorized him to set apart Francis Asbury as a joint superintendent with him, after the method of
the primitive churches. The presbyters of a given locality, the churches advising, selected one of their
number to be the ruling or presiding elder, or presbyter, for that locality. This is the gist of it, and the
whole word-splitting controversy over it was brought about by the Episcopal bias, in the three-order