History Of Methodist Reform, Volume I - Media Sabda Org

a deed of this kind, that I have good evidence to assert it was some time before he could be prevailed
upon to comply with the proposal: and as in most cases where he followed the same guide, he soon
found reason to repent. That Mr. Wesley did actually repent of signing this deed is pretty evident
from the following letter which he wrote about a year afterward, and committed to a friend to deliver
[3]
to the Conference at their first meeting after his decease." The "guide" referred to was undoubtedly
Dr. Coke. These confident assertions of Whitehead should be taken with some allowance, but not
more than the opposite as made by Coke and Moore. The letter referred to Dr. Whitehead gives, and
it indicates not so much repentance for the Deed of Declaration as grave fears based upon the
jealousies he saw spring up among the preachers in the year when the letter was written to the Legal
Hundred. If he harbored regrets for the act it was too late to amend and he did the only thing
remaining: dictate this letter, which as a voice from his grave he hoped would restrain the factions.
Whitehead gives nearly in full this famous Deed, and it is copied by Moore and also Tyerman.
It contains sixteen articles, and those interested in the text can find it in the references given. It
entailed upon 100 out of 192 preachers then in the Conference all Wesley's personal authority, and
legal power over the chapels for ever. It was enrolled in the High Court of Chancery, and has
repeatedly been declared binding by the English courts. It is sharply criticized by Whitehead, but
some of his exceptions are immaterial. Moore comes to its defense, and Coke was so severely
charged with complicity as to call for an address to the societies explanatory of his connection with
it. By its admirers it has been called the Magna Charta of English Methodism. Tyerman analyzes the
choice of Wesley of the one hundred and shows some strangely invidious discriminations. They were
made by a man eighty-one years of age, who, when the storm broke upon him from the excluded,
five of whom, the two Hampsons, father and son, Joseph Pilmoor, William Eels, and John Atlay, had
issued an appeal to the societies against the discriminations and were arraigned at the Conference
of 1785, claimed that if mistakes had been made by him in the selections he was alone responsible,
and they must be attributed, not to his will, but to his judgment. It resulted in the loss of these five,
and some thirty others of the excluded sooner or later withdrew. It was the first evil effect of entailed
Paternalism. Tyerman says: "It was a deed investing a hundred Methodist preachers with the
unexampled power of determining, irrespective of trustees, societies, and congregations, who shall
be the official ministers in the thousands of chapels occupied by Methodist societies at home and
abroad, throughout the United Kingdom, and throughout the world. We purposely refrain from
raising the question about the kind of church government involved in this great settlement." In
common, however, with the annalists having Conference bias, he concedes that without this deed,
"the Methodist itinerancy must have ceased, and Methodism itself have been broken up into
congregational churches." His final word is: "The reader must form his own opinion. Comment
would be easy, but we purposely refrain." [4]
The writer would improve the opportunity thus suggested and offers as facts in bar of this
concession two objections: first, that the whole history of Methodism as a missionary organization
shows that it had its itinerant feature conserved more by the laity than by the ministry. The Deed
made it imperative that no preacher should be continued in any circuit or station longer than three
years. Yet Watson, one of the most prominent of the Conference preachers and writers, a little later,
[5]
in his biography of Wesley, makes his only exception to the Deed against this provision. Both in
England and America this "restrictive rule" as it came to be known, has met in the vast
preponderance of cases its most persistent opponents not from the churches but from the preachers.