History Of Methodist Reform, Volume I - Media Sabda Org

interred under the altar of the Wesley Dover Church. . . . I had changed my route to visit him, but
only reached within one hundred and thirty miles; death was too quick for me." He had acted as
Bishop six years and was in the seventy-first year of his age. Lee makes extended notice of him, of
which a sentence is cited, "in his death the preachers have lost a pattern of piety, and the people have
lost an able teacher."
Asbury's naturally strong constitution was rapidly undermining. It was nearly two years to the
ensuing General Conference, and a project to meet an emergency was conceived, if not by Asbury
himself, it met with his entire approval and cooperation in an endeavor to guard against insecurity
in the Episcopacy. It ostensibly originated with the New York Conference, and it proposed that
forty-nine delegated electors, seven from each Conference, should convene in Baltimore, July 4,
1807, "for the express purpose and with full powers to elect, organize, and establish a permanent
Superintendency, and for no other purpose." The paper was "signed by order, and in behalf of the
unanimous voice of the Conference," by Freeborn Garrettson, Ezekiel Cooper, and Samuel Coate,
attested by the Secretary, Francis Ward, and dated New York, May 22, 1806. It was laid before the
several Conferences by Asbury, and he used all his influence to carry it through them. He succeeded
in New England, the Western, and the South Carolina Conferences, but when it came to Virginia it
met with a decisive rebuff — they refused even to consider it, only seven voting in favor, and on the
second attempt, Asbury being present, only fourteen could be counted in favor. The answer of the
Conference was a transcript of its minutes signed by P. Bruce, Jesse Lee, and T. L. Douglass, as
Secretary. The original document came into the possession of Bishop McKendree as Asbury's literary
executor, and through McKendree's posthumous papers it came into the possession of Bishop Paine,
[3]
McKendree's biographer. Lee says of it, "When it was proposed to the Virginia Conference . . .
they refused to take it into consideration, and rejected it as being pointedly in opposition to all the
rules of our Church. The Bishop labored hard to carry the point, but he labored in vain; and the
whole business of that dangerous plan was overset by the Virginia Conference. The inventors and
defenders of that project might have meant well; but they certainly erred in judgment." Like the
Wilbraham Associate Bishop scheme, it was extra-conferential, but what did the autocratic mind of
Asbury care for lack of precedent and form of law! The fact is there was no law and therefore could
be no transgression. There was simply no precedent, as similar circumstances never before combined
to make one. Lee is credited with the defeat of the measure. Perhaps, to copy the inelegant diction
of an impugner of O'Kelly's motives, "he had a sneaking notion to be a Bishop" and stand in the
shoes of his deceased competitor of 1800.
Lee was a brusque, honest man, and came near being as unmanageable by Asbury as it has been
shown Strawbridge, O'Kelly, and Snethen were. He had much of the quality Asbury commended in
[4]
Alexander McCaine—"Your honest bluntness I approve." Asbury endorsed and urged the plan for
a reason that always dominated with him and Wesley as well: Lead and select your own helpers with
as little conference as possible with your associates, and none with the Church. During the
quadrennium from 1804 to 1808, the defeated proposition for a delegated General Conference came
before the Annual Conferences with varied results. Asbury writes from the South at the close of
1806," We began our conference. The subject of the delegated conference was adopted, with only
two dissentient voices: these members, however, cheerfully submitted, and one of the dissentients
was elected a member."