History Of Methodist Reform, Volume I - Media Sabda Org

turning to Mr. Hutchinson, he said: 'Go there or go home.' Mr. Hutchinson answered, 'Then I must
[2]
go home,' and thus, about 1805, ended his connection with the Methodist Episcopal Church." But
in another case gleaned from Asbury's Journal, and about this time, April, 1805, he writes, "L.
McCombs had refused to take his station. After some alterations were made he consented to go to
Philadelphia." Unlike Hutchinson, this was a clear case of rebellion to his authority. Asbury had his
reasons for yielding, into which no man might inquire nor was it needful, the point was gained; but
into such cases like that of Hutchinson, and they were not isolated, it were useless to inquire, and
there was no redress. Logical and philosophical reflections obtrude themselves and demand
expression at this stage. It is the very genius of a hierarchy to exert its repressive force against
popular liberty in the sense of its last analysis: individualism. And this it does by subordinating the
individual activity to the uniformity of the system. It studiously avoids recognition of the unit, and
spends all its energies in exalting the aggregate. The man is nothing; the system is everything. As
it is exhibited in the unique hierarchy of the Methodist Episcopal Church, modified in administration
by the pressure of liberalism upon it within and without in recent years, yet like the leopard it does
not change its spots, so that the outspoken representative of its genius even in the present year of
grace, eighteen hundred and ninety-four, does not hesitate to inculcate this very sentiment. At the
Baltimore Conference of 1894, Bishop Fowler presiding, one of the most gifted of her chief pastors,
but thoroughly saturated with the authority of office, and enamored of the system as such, addressing
a class of candidates for orders in the presence of the Conference and a crowded congregation,
consumed its time at great length, evidently intending his address for the benefit of the body and the
people present, as much as the four young preachers who stood before him, for the substance of it
was, "You do not come here to be made Baptist, nor Presbyterian ministers, but Methodist ministers.
You do not join the Baltimore Conference, but you join the ministry of the Methodist Episcopal
Church. You become a part of the system and agree to be directed by the authorities of the church
[3]
so as to best promote the efficiency of the system." The address is not thus crystallized because
it misrepresents the polity, but as evidential of affirmations concerning it. It was thus declared that
its controlling, cohesive, and coercive forces are ecclesiastical and not moral, and just so far forth
it is clear that it operates upon the lower plane of human nature and that the trend of its education
is destructive of moral liberty. No question is raised as to the potentiality of such a system, not as
an aggressive force only, but for growth and consolidation. All extant Episcopacies from Rome
downward are in demonstration, but not a few of their strongest and most alert thinkers, specially
in the Methodist Episcopal Church, are holding out the danger signals: the growth and consolidation
of officialism and institutionalism as well. It is admitted that every system will develop its extremes,
and that these must not be made the criterion for either its approval or disapproval abstractly. To use
a nautical figure, if the popular, representative system of the Methodist Protestant Church, by its
leveling principles tends to overweight the hold of the Church craft with ballast and so detracts from
its sailing momentum by settling it too deeply in the water, the system of paternalism, authority in
the head, flies the danger-signal of being top-heavy it carries too great a spread of canvas for the
amount of ballast — its officialism and institutionalism are listing the craft. This is not an invention
or an imagination of the writer. Only a few months since one of the leading periodicals of that
Church, employing the same nautical figure, illustrates the continued repression of lay influence and
gives warning that the timbers of the old ship are creaking and groaning under it, and hints that if
the stokers in the hold, meaning the laymen who supply the sinews of strength, once throw down
their shovels, and the fires burn low or are extinguished, there will be no longer use for the
blue-coated officers who pace the ship's bridge and command the quarter-deck trumpet in hand.