History Of Methodist Reform, Volume I - Media Sabda Org

conducted well." He did not offer his plan at any other Conference. It did not fall in with the humor
of the preachers, and to press it might prove another cause of serious contention, so he dropped it.
Lee and Wells accompanied him to the South, then Whatcoat joined Lee, and Wells returned, and
together the first two went on with him as far as Charleston, S. C., and in accordance with the new
order of the previous year of beginning the Conferences from the South northward, so as to secure
better weather for Asbury. Before another year he is back in Massachusetts. Think of it, twice the
length of the continent mostly horseback, for a sick man within a year. Lee attended the Charleston
Conference for him; Asbury was afraid of the malaria, and says, "I believed that going to Charleston
this season would end my life." The blessed work of soul-saving after the Methodist fashion was
again going on. Lee says that at the close of 1797 there had been a net gain of 1999 members, the
first gains reported for five years, and this small outcome is in proof how deeply the O'Kelly
secession and its causes had shaken the very foundations, and how widely it had affected the public
mind against the arbitrary system of Asbury, so that new converts and thoughtful people stood aloof
from the Church. This will read like a novel explanation to those who have found no hint of it in
other histories of these times, but every current fact vouches for its truth.
During Asbury's enforced brief seasons of rest, he engaged himself in revising his Journal. This
year Alexander McCaine, who will figure so largely and notably in this History thirty years later, and
who was the O'Kelly of the new Reform, was received on "trial" with thirty-eight others. Honored
names occur in the roster of the Conference, and the Eldership was particularly strong. Among those
admitted in 1798 are Lorenzo Dow, heretofore noticed; Truman Bishop, one of the purest men of
his day, and a Reformer of 1827-29, against whom calumny never raised its voice, though he set his
face like a flint against the persecuting spirit and practice of his quondam brethren; and Billy
Hibbard, whose eccentricities and usefulness were excelled only by Dow's. Nicholas Snethen had
joined the Conference in 1794 and rapidly forged his way to the front as a young man. he had great
versatility of talent, a voice of wonderful timbre and penetration, education above his peers, deep
spirituality, and developed a mind more philosophical and logically prescient than any other man
ever produced by early Methodism. The minutes of 1798 give nearly three pages, an extraordinary
length, to an obituary of John Dickins, who died September 22, but of whom enough has been
already said in this History.
Comparison of statistics as to membership from 1792 to 1796, the period of the O'Kelly agitation
and secession, is very uncertain if the printed minutes are followed, for notable errors occur in the
summing up. A glaring one is found in the minutes of 1791, of thirteen thousand in the white
[3]
membership. It ought to have been easy of detection by comparing these of 1790 with those of
1792, but it is carried over from the edition of Dickins in 1795 to those of 1813 without correction.
And for this period a cursory reader of these minutes could not detect any declension of numbers
from 1792 to 1796, yet Jesse Lee, who next to Asbury was in closest touch with the whole work,
declares, after giving the aggregates according to states which are found to be perfectly accurate
compared with the same in the Minutes, except that he counts white and colored together, making
for 1796, 56,664, that, "We lost in numbers for this year (1796) 2627 members. We have been going
back, and our numbers decreasing for three years past, in which time we have lost 10,979 members
in number. The declension was mostly in the middle states, and especially where the divisive spirit
most prevailed." Methodist historians do not cite these figures of Lee's, but, by citing the not