History Of Methodist Reform, Volume I - Media Sabda Org

The Birstal chapel case already noted turned largely on the action of the trustees reserving to
themselves not so much the power to continue beyond the restricted time a pastor, but the right to
change at their own option, as often as deemed expedient. If, as already suggested, one hundred
laymen had been added to the one hundred preachers as a body corporate, a conservative element
would have been introduced insuring the itinerant plan and the unity of the societies Coke had
proposed; Tyerman declares that the whole body of the preachers should have been incorporated, a
plan he endorses, and this would have saved the Conference from much damaging agitation,
discontent, and secession; but Wesley says he thought first of committing the matter to a dozen of
the preachers, and appears to have fallen upon the hundred plan as a compromise, giving no better
reason for it than the expense of assembling all the Conference annually and their absence from the
fields of labor, as he sets forth in his "Thoughts upon some Late Occurrences," published in
vindication of his action in the spring of 1785. He also felicitates himself on it as "such a foundation
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as is likely to stand as long as the sun and moon endure." The second and more serious objection
to the Deed of Declaration is its entailment of Paternalism as a system of government in the kingdom
of God. Almost anything maybe allowed Wesley during his life-tenure of absolute rule, and
investment in himself of property. If not the wisest procedure that might have been adopted, for the
nonce it was the most efficient, and the purity of his personal character was a guard against abuse.
But the Deed, in its sixteen articles, is a curious melange. It provides for the act of the majority being
the act of the whole, provided not less than forty are present; and of the election by the one hundred
of a President annually. The first business is the filling of vacancies out of the members of the
Conference by this close corporation of the Legal Hundred. It was a wide modification of his views
of the successorship when he purposed that Fletcher should wear his mantle. It recognized suffrage
at least within the hundred, while it secured Paternalism in their choice of a personal head. It is futile,
however, to consider all that can be said for and against it provisions. It has the virtue, if such it can
be called, of securing a self-perpetuating machine with unlimited powers, with its foundation in
property. It has the vice as an active principle of securing directly or indirectly the destruction of
Methodist English unity, the very thing which its Founder was most anxious to avoid. One admission
must be made: this and other mischievous resultants, if foreseen by others, could not have been by
Wesley, as he was not making provision for a Church. The marvel cannot be suppressed that, if he
studied New Testament precedents, he adopted not one of them. Their use did not come within his
purview. Here let the question rest until in the sequel of this sketchy history of English Methodism
the evidence shall develop, as heretofore promised, that this entailed Paternalism sowed the seeds
and brought forth the fruit of constantly recurring agitation and disaffection within the Wesleyan
Conference, with repeated divisions in the United Societies — now a misnomer by the excision of
Reformers under the ninth article of the Deed: "That the Conference may and shall expel any
member thereof, or any person admitted into connection therewith, for any cause which to the
Conference may seem necessary."
1784 was, indeed, a "climacteric year for Methodism," — a phrase originating with Whitehead,
and not with Southey, as Stevens seems to intimate, — not for the Deed of Declaration only, but for
the ordinations of Coke, Whatcoat, and Vasey for America. Its exhaustive presentation would be
proper at this period, and this is the method of Stevens and others; but as it necessarily recurs in
association with the organization of the Methodist Episcopal Church at the Christmas Conference
of 1784, and as much additional light was thrown upon these ordinations by Alexander McCaine
during the Reform controversy of 1824-30, reinforced since then by other discovered facts and