History Of Methodist Reform, Volume I - Media Sabda Org

under the extreme advantage of many years' residence in Baltimore, the Methodist center of historic
data. How well he has performed the work it will be for the reader to decide.
The sources and authorities cited in this History, with rare exceptions noted, are in the author's
possession to be preserved intact, and held accessible for verification under any reasonable request,
inasmuch as many of its allegations are at variance with the received historical statements; and a
whole class of facts is disclosed heretofore minified or suppressed by, or unknown to, historical
writers on both English and American Methodism. The writer has been careful of the ground so that
a challenge is hereby recorded of successful contradiction of its averments as to matters of fact. His
inferential positions may at times be strained or erroneous and these he submits to such controversial
questioning as may be possible.
It is the custom of most historians to prefix to their work a bibliography of the sources and
authorities consulted in its preparation. Such a compilation is not only helpful but necessary, when
citations have been made without such references. In this work all citations are verified as to source
and authority in the numerous foot-notes of the current narrative, so that a bibliography would be
but a repetition of these titles. Sometimes the bibliography as a porch is more imposing than the
structure, and carries the semblance at least of pedantry. Its absence in this work is not a loss.
The writer discovered when midway in his preparatory investigation that a History of the
Methodist Protestant Church, logically stated and philosophically treated, could not be prepared
without an enlargement of its original purview so inclusive as to comprehend at least synoptically
the whole history of Methodism. The germinal principles incorporated in its Constitution and
Discipline were disclosed in the governmental Reform movements during Wesley's life and since
in English Methodism. And it is a remarkable fact that, without cooperation or knowledge of each
other's movements, under the instigation of a common hierarchic rule, thoughtful Methodists both
of the ministry and laity on either side of the ocean were working on independent lines to the same
end of governmental Reform. The writer therefore found it necessary to give a broader title to his
work as "The History of Methodist Reform," with his own denomination as the objective. The
discriminating reader will discover that there was nothing new in the Methodist Reform movements
from the tentative ones of Gatch, Dickins, O'Kelly and others in Virginia as early as 1778; of
O'Kelly, McKendree, Rice Haggard, Hope Hull and others in 1792; the more effective ones of
Snethen, Emory, Stockton and others in 1820-24; and later of Shinn, Jennings, Brown, Dorsey,
McCaine and others for 1824-30. The objections they formulated and the protests they entered
against the Paternal system of Asbury and the hierarchic features embodied by his pliant followers
in the "Rules and Regulations" of the Methodist Episcopal Church of 1784, are all to be found in the
seed of kindred objections and protests made by Wesleyan Methodist preachers and laymen from
quite an early period of English Methodism down to the climacteric movement of 1849, which shook
the parent body to its foundations.
Another great advantage of this historical method is, that it furnishes our own denominational
readers succinctly all of Methodist literature without recourse to historians and monographists whose
coloring is unfavorable to liberal views. As common property it is, therefore, appropriated for
information as to the rise and progress of doctrinal Methodism and its spiritual agencies, called
"means of grace," touching which perfect unity has been preserved among our coreligionists the wide