History Of Methodist Reform, Volume I - Media Sabda Org

faith. 4th. Christian character or vital piety the true Scriptural test of fellowship or church
membership. 5th. The right of private judgment and the liberty of conscience the privilege and duty
of all." They hold an annual convention of a representative character, and at their last meeting
claimed some two hundred societies under their union. The subject need not be pursued farther.
Enough has been shown completely to vindicate O'Kelly and his followers from the aspersion of
[11]
heresy. He was as true to the Articles of Religion and doctrinal standards of Methodism as those
who traduced him; and historians of that ilk should correct their records and sin no more against his
memory. The final allusion of Stevens needs correction, "Though the schism lingered, it gradually
died from this period," i.e. the period of 1801. It is fair to admit that he knew no better, though the
same sources of information were open to him if he had sought for them. With Snethen it is believed
to have been premature and ill-considered, and as a secession not to be justified in the circumstances;
but its author died under a full persuasion of its necessity and rightfulness. "To the latest period of
his life he retained unabated confidence in the purity and power of his system. In age and feebleness
his hope in the work of his hands did not desert him. He went down to the grave, according to one
of his followers, satisfied with the past, and peaceful and trustful with respect to the future." [12]
A few facts and reflections remain in conclusion of this subject. Asbury relates in his Journal,
under date of August 20, 1802, Winchester, Va. — "Mr. O'Kelly having been taken ill in town, I sent
two of our brethren, Reed and Walls, to see him, by whom I signified that if he wished to see me I
would wait upon him: he desired a visit, which I made him on Monday, August 23. We met in peace,
asked of each other's welfare, talked of persons and things indifferently, prayed, and parted in peace.
Not a word was said of the troubles of former times. Perhaps this is the last interview we shall have
upon the earth." The interview is alike honorable to both. They went their ways again, Asbury to
survive fourteen years and O'Kelly twenty-four. It is a sad fact that Stevens, after noting this
exchange of Christian courtesies, should occupy a full page in moral reflections, in which he classes
O'Kelly's proceedings in the same category with the sins and frailties of David, Judas, and Peter,
concluding with the Scriptural admonition, "Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall."
It has been affirmed that the liberal lay features of the seceding Church had little, if anything, to
do 'with the circumscription to its original boundaries and, at best, its stunted growth. Rev. W. C.
[13]
Lipscomb, an unimpeachable witness, testified that it failed of general adoption by the Methodists
for want of proper disciplinary arrangements solely. In evidence of this statement he cites his
[14]
recollection of a conversation with Major Simon Sommers, who was contemporary with O'Kelly
and a Methodist of that early day, and, though not identified with his societies, was personally
acquainted with him and knew whereof he affirmed, a large society of Republican Methodists
existing in the neighborhood of his plantation, "Sommerville," where he lived and died. His opinion
in effect was that if O'Kelly had rejected only such parts of the Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal
Church as were deemed objectionable, and retained the remainder, he "would have swept the
concern." And now, as offsetting Stevens' category of ecclesiastical sinners, the whole of this
Asbury-O'Kelly contest may be crystallized in the language of Mr. Gladstone, ex-premier of
England. In a recent article on "The Place of Heresy and Schism in the Modern Christian Church,"
speaking of the non-conformists and citing their service to both the Church and State, he observes,
"There are civil cases when, though we may not be able to say the rebel is in the right, yet we can
clearly see that the possessor of power, who drove him to be a rebel, is far more profoundly in the
wrong."
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