History Of Methodist Reform, Volume I - Media Sabda Org

ut for the children, the boys only until they were eight years old, when they were to be sent to the
Kingswood school, and girls until they were fourteen. This Conference was memorable for inciting
the warmest controversy of a doctrinal kind that ever raged in the societies. A minute of the
Conference a little incautiously worded revived the Calvinistic discussion. Wesley himself had
grown tired of disputations of the kind, but the points involved were vigorously taken up, with
Shirley, Toplady, and Hill on the one side and Fletcher and Olivers on the other. It produced the
celebrated and imperishable "Checks to Antinomianism" by Fletcher, who proved himself more than
a match for all his opponents. His work is a splendid specimen of Christian controversial writing.
It settled the theological character of Methodism as emphatically Arminian. The controversy ran
through several years, and Wesley, goaded by constant misrepresentations of the minute of 1770,
printed an exposition of its true meaning for circulation among the preachers.
Trouble occurred in Dublin, a dispute regarding the authority of the preachers and the leaders
respectively, thus showing that the hierarchal system of wheels within wheels, after all, does not
work without serious friction. It possesses the one advantage of the power to crush, generally, it must
be admitted, the wrongdoers, but always liable to grind the innocent without adequate provision for
redress. Wesley wrote, "In the Methodist discipline the wheels regularly stand thus: the assistants,
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the preachers, the stewards, the leaders, the people." The pyramid stood on its apex. This fact
focalized the whole difference, which is seen to agitate the societies twenty years before his death;
directly or indirectly to disrupt it afterward, and to lead in America to numerous divisions, and an
agitation which cannot cease in the nature of the case until the pyramid stands on its base — the
people. Wesley makes the following entry in his Journal: "1771, June 28th — this day I entered the
sixty-ninth year of my age. I am still a wonder to myself. My voice and strength are the same as at
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nine and twenty. This also hath God wrought." He rises before you a sublime, historical figure
unparalleled by any other of his class. He ascends on eagles' wings, preaching, traveling, and writing
as never before. His sun of life was westering for a rich and mellow setting. A halo seemed to settle
about his head, which gave the only sign of his advancing years in its almond blossoms, so that
wherever he went veneration fell upon the people, and the preachers were awed to stillness in his
presence.
The twenty-eighth session of Conference began at Bristol, August 8, 1771. The call from America
for more laborers was responded to by five — two were sent, Francis Asbury and Richard Wright.
A name famous in Methodism appears upon the roll for the first time, Joseph Benson. He lived to
be twice President of the Wesleyan Conference, and from 1803 to his death in 1821, editor of the
Methodist Magazine and author of an elaborate commentary. In this year Miss Bosanquet, the future
wife of Fletcher, wrote Wesley for advice as to female preaching, and in his answer he rests the case
in her admitted extraordinary call, which he conceded also to his lay-preachers, and thus began in
Methodism an important movement for woman's emancipation from old traditions, the end of which
is not yet, much as has been gradually conceded in the 120 odd years to this date.
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