Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/197

Rh METHODISM 187 development of Wesley s &quot; Society.&quot; The clergy not only excluded the Wesleys from their pulpits, but often repelled them and their converts from the Lord s Supper. Thi was first done on a large scale, and with a systematic harshness and persistency, at Bristol in 1740. Under these circumstances the brothers took thecdecisive step of administering the sacrament to their societies themselves, in their own meeting-rooms, both at Bristol and at Kings- wood. This practice having thus been established at Bristol, it was not likely that the original society at the Foundery would rest content without the like privilege, especially as some of the clergy in London acted in the same manner as those at Bristol. There were therefore at the Foundery also separate administrations. Here then, in 1740, were two if we include Kingswood, three separate local churches, formed, it is true, and both served and governed by ordained clergymen of the Church of England, but not belonging to that church or in any respect within its government. As thereafter during Wesley s life one of the brothers, or some cooperative or friendly clergyman, was almost always present in London and in Bristol for the administration of the sacraments, these communions, when once begun, were afterwards steadily maintained, the Lord s Supper being, as a rule, administered weekly. Both on Sundays and on week days full provision was made for all the spiritual wants of these &quot; societies,&quot; apart altogether from the services of the Church of England. The only link by which the societies were connected with that church and this was a link of sentiment, not an organic one was that the ministers who served them were numbered among its &quot; priests.&quot; In 1741 Wesley entered upon his course of calling out lay preachers, who itinerated under his directions. To the societies founded and sustained with the aid of these preachers, who were entirely and absolutely under Wesley s personal control, the two brothers, in their extensive journeys, administered the sacraments as they were able. The helpers only ranked as laymen, many of them, indeed, being men of humble attainments and of unpolished ways. For the ordinary reception of the sacraments the societies in general were dependent on the parish clergy, who, how ever, not seldom repelled them from the Lord s table. So also for the ordinary opportunities of public worship they often had no resource but the parish church. The simple service in their preaching-room was, as Wesley himself insisted, defective, as a service of public worship, in some important particulars : besides which, the visits of the itinerants were usually, at least at first, few and far between. Wesley accordingly was urgent in his advices and injunctions that his societies generally should keep to their parish churches ; but long before his death, especially as the itinerant preachers improved in quality and increased in number, there was a growing desire among the societies to have their own full Sunday services, and to have the sacraments administered by their own preachers. The development of these preachers into ministers, and of the societies into fully organized churches, was, if not the inevitable, at any rate the natural, result of the steps which Wesley took in order to carry on the work that was continually opening up before him. In 1744 Wesley held his first Conference. The early Conferences were chiefly useful for the settlement of points of doctrine and discipline arid for the examination and accrediting of fellow- labourers. They met yearly. Conferences were a necessity for Wesley, and became incieasingly so as his work continued to grow upon him. It was inevitable also that the powers of the Conference, although for many years the Conference itself only existed as it were on sufferance, and only exercised any authority by the per mission of its creator and head, should continually increase. The result was that in 1784 Wesley could no longer delay the legal constitution of the Conference, and that he was compelled, if he would provide for the perpetuation of his work, to take measures for vesting in trustees, for the use of &quot;the people called Method ists,&quot; under the jurisdiction of the Conference as to the appoint ment of ministers and preachers, all the preaching places and trust property of the Connexion. The legal Conference was defined as consisting of one hundred itinerant preachers named by Wesley, and power was given to the &quot; legal hundred &quot; continually from the first to fill up the vacancies in their own number, to admit and expel preachers, and to station them from year to year, no preacher being allowed to remain more than three years in one station. By this measure Wesley s work was consolidated into a distinct religious organization, having a legally corporate character and large property rights. And yet Wesley would not allow this great organization to be styled a &quot;church.&quot; It was only a &quot;society&quot; the &quot;United Society&quot; the Society of &quot;the people called Method ists&quot; the &quot;Methodist Society.&quot; And of its members all who were not professed Dissenters were by him reckoned as belonging to the Church of England, although a large and increasing pro portion of them seldom or never attended the services of that church. The explanation of this apparent inconsistency is that Wesley admitted none to be Dissenters except such as were so in the eye of the law those who, &quot;for conscience sake, refused to join in the services of the church or partake of the sacraments administered therein&quot; and that he interpreted &quot; the Church of England &quot; to mean, as he wrote to his brother Charles, &quot; all the believers in England, except Papists and Dissenters, who have the word of God and the sacraments administered among them. &quot; But Wesley was to carry his Society to a yet higher pitch cf development, and one which made it still more difficult to dis tinguish its character from that of a distinct and separate church. In 1738 Wesley had been theoretically a High-Churchman. For some time even after he had entered upon his course of irregular and independent evangelism he continued to hold, in the abstract, High-Church views. But in 1746 he abandoned once for all his ecclesiastical High-Churchmanship, although he never became either a political or a latitudinarian Low-Churchman after the standard and manner of the 18th century. He relates in his journal under date January 20, 1746, how his views were revolu tionized by reading Lord (Chancellor) King s account of the primitive church. From this time forward he consistently main tained that the &quot; uninterrupted succession was a fable which no man ever did or could prove. &quot; One of the things taught him by Lord King s book was that the office of bishop was originally one and the same with that of presbyter ; and the practical inference which Wesley drew was that he himself was a &quot; Scriptural Episco- pos,&quot; and that he had as much right as any primitive or missionary bishop to ordain ministers, as his representatives and helpers, who should administer the sacraments, instead of himself, to the societies which had placed themselves under his spiritual charge. This right, as he conceived it to be, he held in abeyance for nearly forty years, but at length he was constrained to exercise it, and, by so doing, in effect led the way towards making his Society a distinct and independent church. In 1784, the American colonies having won their independence, it became necessary to organize a separate Methodism for America, where Methodist societies had existed for many years. Wesley gave formal ordination and letters of ordination to Dr Coke, already a presbyter of the Church of England, as superintendent (or bishop) for America, where Coke ordained Francis Asbury as presbyter and superintendent (or bishop), and Coke and Asbury together ordained the American preachers as presbyters. From that ordination dates the ecclesiastical commencement of American Episcopal Methodism in which the bishops are only chief among the presbyters whom they superintend, superior in office but of the same order. The Episcopal Methodism of America represents to day the largest aggregate of Protestant communicants and worship pers of the same ecclesiastical name to be found in any one nation in the world. The following year (1785) Wesley ordained ministers for Scot land. There his societies were quite outside of the established Presbyterianism of the day, with its lukewarm &quot; moderatism &quot;; while the fervid sects which had seceded from the state church would hold no terms with Arminians like Wesley and his followers. Hence Wesley was compelled to make special provision for the administration of the sacraments in Scotland. He therefore ordained some of his ablest and most dignified preachers, was careful to give them formally in his correspondence the style and title of &quot;Reverend,&quot; and appointed them to administer the sacra ments north of the Tweed. At length, in 1788, Wesley ordained a number of preachers (Mr Tyerman says seven) to assist him in administering the sacraments to the societies in England ; and of these he ordained one (Alexan der Mather) to be superintendent (or bishop), his brother Charles being now dead, and Dr Coke sometimes absent for long periods in America. The number of societies which demanded to have the sacraments administered to them in their own places of worship continually increased, and their claims were often too strong to be resisted, especially when the parish priest was either a public