History Of Methodist Reform, Volume I - Media Sabda Org

It will be happy for them, and happy for us all, if no strife creeps in among them, who shall be
greatest." And, finally, for the culmination of this prognostication, "We hope that our prediction will
not secure its own fulfillment; but really our presentiment is, that before the middle of the present
century a motion will be introduced into the General Conference, in effect to make an archbishop,
and that party spirit will run high enough to cause it to pass to a second reading." The presentiment
is logical in its sequence and based upon an axiomatic truth he uttered in another connection, namely,
"No temptation to ambition is greater than opportunity." Again, "The body must be one, and the
name one, that the head may find no resistance in council or command." Once more he speaks with
the wisdom of a seer: "Mr. Hume, in a very able essay, explains the fact that the Persians submitted
for a long time to their conquerors, the Greeks, by proving that the successors of Alexander adopted
the polity of the Persian kings. Their polity was the same in civil matters that ours (M. E. Church)
is in church government. In one view it seems very humiliating that a whole community, whether
civil or religious, should be entirely dependent upon one man; but in another it is easy to perceive
that such a state of dependence must generate expectation, that the same hand that humbles us may
exalt us also. By sweeping away every element of aristocratic authority, as well as personal liberty,
it is that all absolute governments, whether in Church or State, animate the hopes of all, from the
least unto the greatest, so that the men who have no security for their highest honors are,
nevertheless, stimulated to the greatest fidelity and zeal in the service of the superior, knowing that
all are waiting and watching for their place. Were it not for this great principle of attachment and
hope, all the monarchies and hierarchies, and ours among the rest, would soon fall into ruins."
Snethen was not without evidence in his day of the tendency here vaticinated. On the same general
subject he farther declares, "The body of the preachers to the west and south of Maryland, with a part
of the Episcopacy [this was written when there were three bishops], and some preachers elsewhere,
claim for the senior bishop a precedence; which, though they have not clearly defined, cannot be
easily misunderstood in those cases in which his judgment happens to conflict with the
Conferences." The current of history shows, however, that the fulfillment of his presentiment was
arrested ere it matured. His logical sequence was correct, but he did not make sufficient allowance
for that conservative force of democratic tendency inhering in the preachers. It never got farther than
the senior bishop, so that the hierarchy of the Methodist Episcopal Church is a clear instance,
ecclesiastically, of arrest of development. There was not wanting in a later day a sickening toadyism,
and aping of titles, indicative of a trend in the arrested direction. On the death of Bishop Morris, then
senior bishop, one of the Advocates dubbed him, "The Right Reverend Father in God, Bishop
Thomas A. Morris."
The logical certitude of Snethen's well-ordered mind led him to several other conclusions, which,
tried by the logic of facts, turned out to be erroneous. In 1822 he wrote: "It cannot be long, I am fully
persuaded, before the traveling preachers must give up their supremacy. If they will not be advised
and warned with the voice of friendship and love, they may expect that the providence of God, which
is so evidently abroad in the earth, vindicating the injured and insulted attribute of the lawgiver of
the universe, will make its displeasure fearfully evident." He lived nearly a quarter of a century after
this utterance of indignant warmth, only to learn the truth of the legend left to Reformers by one of
their earlier zealots, who later became a bishop and exercised the very power he denounced, Rev.
Dr. John Emory, "The march of power is ever onward, and its fearful tendency is to accumulation."
Nearly a half-century more has passed away, and there has been but slight relaxation of the vise-like
grip of ministerial prerogative, and it may be truthfully averred that the concessions so far made have