History Of Methodist Reform, Volume I - Media Sabda Org

of his name in 1786, the fact that he was sent on his missionary trip to Nova Scotia, but, miscarried
by storm, ended in the West India mission; and this probably protracted absence led the Conference
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through its secretary to drop his name for the time. It is not satisfactory. Suffice it to say as to this
whole business that the serious amount of ink wasted by all the parties to the controversy has no
better foundation than the unintentional, but unavoidable, misleading effect of Drew's associating
the address to Washington and the censure of Coke by the Conference with 1785. No reader can
understand him otherwise. It is not too much to say, however, that McCaine, as an educated preacher
and school-teacher, ought to have known that in 1785 Washington was in private life on his
plantation at Mt. Vernon, nor does he concede his error, when pointed out, as frankly as he should
have done. A final word as to Asbury and the address. While he remained through life a British
subject he came to have a sincere admiration for Washington, and believed the outcome of the
Revolution to have been providential, and for the good of the country.
The minutes of the Conference of 1790 have the following question and answer: "Q. What can
be done for the instruction of poor children (whites and blacks) to read? A. Let us labor as the heart
and soul of one man, to establish Sunday-schools, in or near the places of public worship. Let
persons be appointed by the bishops, elders, deacons, or preachers, to teach (gratis) all that will
attend, and have a capacity to learn, from six in the morning until ten, and from two o'clock in the
afternoon till six, where it does not interfere with public worship." Stevens says in his notice of this
event that he quotes the action of the Conference from Lee as "the bound minutes do not give it."
This makes it clear that he did not have a copy of those printed by Dickins in 1795, in my possession,
for the action does appear in them. He depended on the edition of 1813, which was materially altered
by the bishops before publication in some essential particulars, of which more notice may yet be
taken. What the minute does is to establish that it was the first recognition of Sunday Schools by an
American Church. It was only nine years after their establishment in England by Robert Raikes, who
derived the idea from a young Methodist woman. Four years before this minute, or in 1786, Asbury
established a Sunday-school, the first in the New World, at the house of Thomas Crenshaw in
Hanover County, Va. The effort of Asbury from 1790 met with discouragements, but finally
succeeded under modifications, and the Sunday-school Union of that Church is now an unexampled
power for good intrinsically and of denominational cohesion and growth.
The revival flame which broke out in 1789 continued to burn with unabated ardor through the two
succeeding years, and there was a vast increase of members, while the additions to the itinerancy
more than met the demands of the enlarging work. It was necessary, for the locations and deaths
were numerous through the hardship, exposure, and the celibate life demanded and encouraged by
Asbury. Stevens says: "Of 650 whose names appear in the minutes, by the close of the century, about
500 died or located, and many of the remainder were, for a longer or shorter interval, in the local
ranks, but were able again to enter the itinerancy. Nearly half of those whose deaths are recorded
died before they were thirty years old; about two-thirds died before they had spent twelve years in
the laborious service. They fell martyrs to their work." He gives lists of them by name.
Stevens also says, "No important doctrinal heresy had yet disturbed them." It is the central fact
of Methodism. And the same may be said for the hundred years of evangelism which have rolled
away since; the doctrines and the means of grace in all the branches of Wesleyan religion have
preserved a wonderful unity. Would that as much could be said of the ecclesiastical system of its