History Of Methodist Reform, Volume I - Media Sabda Org

argument against innovation. Traditions had grown up around the Church which supplemented the
written law, so that, as Snethen declared, "success was virtue." How fallacious it is, history is full
of parallels both ecclesiastical and civil. Stevens, at the close of his "History," sums up an admirable
argument in support of the unique system of Methodism, and no Reform Methodist would wish to
invalidate it. It was and is their conviction, if the measures proposed by them had been incorporated,
despite the difficulties of such an undertaking in view of facts just adverted to in making inroads
upon the marvelous machinery of ecclesiasticism of the Methodist type, it would have rendered still
more efficient the general plan, with the exceptional and exclusive virtue of preserving that
Methodist unity of polity which, as has so far it is believed been abundantly proven, was destroyed
by the prevailing hierarchy. In the course of his masterful argument he does not seem to see the
extreme weakness of one of its links — "For the first time in recorded history was about to be seen
the spectacle of a great nation without a state religion. Medieval dogmatism was to be more fully
thrown into abeyance; ecclesiasticism and hierarchism to receive a shock under which they might
reel for a while, but only to fall sooner or later, to their proper subordination, or desuetude."
The term hierarchism is unpalatable to Methodist Episcopalians as applicable to the system under
which they live yet when for other purposes it is found answering to the ecclesiastical fact they do
not hesitate to use it as a semi-stigma. So it is here employed by Stevens, and so it is employed by
Wesley in his letter to the American societies in 1784 — "as our American brethren are now totally
disentangled, both from the State and the English hierarchy, we dare not entangle them again, either
with the one or with the other." To be oblivious of the tendency, if not the very form of your own
favorite system while condemning its features in one antagonized for any reason, is in accord with
our knowledge of human nature. The excerpt from Wesley's letter does one of two things as a
dilemma. Either his purpose, "not to entangle them again," means that his plan as detailed in "the
little sketch" of church government he intrusted to Coke, but which he found expedient to suppress
by reason in the main of Asbury's opposition to it, was not such a hierarchic system as he is charged
with having formulated, and which the Christmas Conference only legislatively enacted into the
Methodist Episcopal Church; or, he is open to the logical inconsistency of denouncing it in the
Established Church of England and its congener in America, and at the same time of laying the
foundations of a more absolute form of hierarchy through Dr. Coke — A new Methodist
"succession" through himself to anticipate the reorganization of the Protestant Episcopal Church;
thereby sustaining the allegation of George Bancroft in his "History of the United States," that "he
resolved to get the start of the English hierarchy." It is upon just this dilemma that the whole of the
voluminous controversy, begun in 1827 by McCaine's "History and Mystery," and which continues
down to this day, hinges; and which will probably never be settled to the satisfaction of both
contestants, though the ground is being so totally dug away from under the feet of the advocates of
Mr. Wesley's fatherhood of the Methodist Episcopal Church, that recent writers of that Church me
making concessions, wrung out of them by the "potency of a definite fact," to use the expressive
phrase of an American statesman, that he could not have intended, and never gave countenance to
the hierarchy born of the Christmas Conference, whatever may have been his personal preferences
as to church polity, and whatever he might have done, or probably would have done, had he been
present, or even consulted. The only question is: What did he do? and the answer gathers volume
and sweep more and more that he did not dream of a Christmas Conference and never approved its
enactments. This negative view established, Wesley's logical consistency is vindicated, and the
argument lost for those who maintain the affirmative.