(5) Lee does distinctly name the session of 1792 as "the first regular General Conference."

(6) James O'Kelly, when he withdrew from the Church, five years later, in his pamphlet against Asbury accused him. of excessive " sharpness" toward Coke at Charleston. About fourteen years after the alleged General Conference, Asbury writes: "There was no sharpness at all upon my side with Dr. Coke, at Charleston, respecting the proposed General Conference, (which was afterward held in 1792.) I was fully convinced that nothing else would finish the unhappy business with O'Kelly, and that did finish it.”

Coke says, in his letter to the General Conference of 1808, There are few of you who can possibly recollect anything of what I am next going to add. Many of you were then only little children. We had at that time [1791] no regular General Conference. One only had been held in the year 1784. I had indeed, with great labor and fatigue, a few months before I wrote this letter to Bishop White, prevailed on James O'Kelly to submit to the decision of a General Conference. This Conference was to be held in about a year and a half after my departure from the States. And at this Conference, held, I think, the latter end of 1792, I proposed and obtained that great blessing to the American connection, a permanency for General Conferences, which were to be held at stated times. Previously to the holding of this Conference (except the general one held in 1784) there were only small district meetings, excepting the council which was held at Cokesbury College either in 1791 or 1792.

And here the case may be rested: the Baltimore Conference of 1787 was not a General Conference, nor did one meet until 1792.*

In 1787 the Discipline underwent a complete revision. For the first time it was arranged in sections under appropriate heads. This was done by Bishop Asbury, with the aid, chiefly clerical, of John Dickins. As early as Nov. 27, 1785, he says in his Journal, "For some time past, I had not been quite satisfied with the order and arrangement of our Form of Discipline; and, persuaded that it might be improved without difficulty, we accordingly set about it, and, during my confinement [with a disabled foot] in James' City, completed the work, arranging the subject matter thereof

*The preceding arguments have been mainly condensed from Stevens.

under their proper heads, divisions, and sections." April 5, 1786, he writes, "Read our Form of Discipline in manuscript, which brother Dickins has been preparing for the press." The publication was delayed, however, until May, 1787, "probably with a view of obtaining the concurrence of Dr. Coke;" but there is no evidence that it was submitted to the Baltimore Conference which met at that time. In this Discipline the superintendents were first called Bishops, and from it the second question of the former Discipline, embracing the resolution of submission to Mr. Wesley, was omitted. This omission is proof that this Discipline was not published until after the Baltimore Conference of May, 1787, which took this action: the introduction of the title "bishop," without the sanction of this Conference, but for which Conference confirmation was subsequently asked, is proof that this edition of the Discipline, newly revised and arranged as it was, was not submitted to the inspection or approval of the Conference, but was published by authority of the Bishops. Asbury and Coke were hardly shorn of all espiscopal prerogatives, and an unfastidious Church, in whose memory the powers long exercised by General Assistants were still fresh, did not deny them these privileges. Jesse Lee says:

The third question in the second section, and the answer, read thus: Ques. Is there any other business to be done in Conference? Ans. The electing and ordaining of bishops, elders, and deacons. This was the first time that our superintendents ever gave themselves the title of bishops in the Minutes. They changed the title themselves, without the consent of the Conference; and at the next Conference they asked the preachers if the word bishop might stand in the Minutes-seeing that it was a Scripture name, and the meaning of the word bishop was the same with that of superintendent. Some of the preachers opposed the alteration, and wished to retain the former title; but a majority of the preachers agreed to let the word bishop remain; and in the Annual Minutes for the next year the first question is, Who are the bishops of our Church for the United States? In the third section of this Form of Discipline, and in the sixth page, it is said: We have constituted ourselves into an Episcopal Church under the direction of bishops, elders, deacons, and preachers, according to the form of ordination annexed to our prayer-book, and the regulations laid down in this Form of Discipline. From that time the name of bishop has been in common use among us, both in conversation and in writing.†

Emory, History of Discipline, p. 81. † History of the Methodists, pp. 128, 129.

The Minutes of 1787 retain the title "Superintendents; in 1788, the question is first asked, "Who are the Bishops of our Church for the United States?" The answer is, "Thomas Coke, Francis Asbury," the qualifying clause with regard to Coke, "when present in the States," being omitted. This is fresh proof that the Discipline of 1787 was published after the Conference of that year: the "next Conference," referred to by Lee, which confirmed the change made by the Bishops in the Discipline, was the Conference of 1788.

Referring to the eleven Conferences appointed for 1789, Lee says that "several of these Conferences were within thirty or forty miles of each other, which was pretty generally disliked; but at that time the bishop had the right of appointing as many Conferences as he thought proper, and at such times and places as he judged best." He gives us, also, the best account of the manner of the formal restoration of Mr. Wesley's name to the Minutes, in 1789, without the reënactment of the resolution of submission.

As some persons had complained of our receding from a former engagement made by some of our preachers, that “during the life of Mr. Wesley, in matters belonging to Church government, they would obey his commands," and as others had thought that we did not pay as much respect to Mr. Wesley as we ought, the bishops introduced a question in the Annual Minutes, which was as follows: Ques. Who are the persons that exercise the episcopal office in the Methodist Church in Europe and America? Ans. John Wesley, Thomas Coke, and Francis Asbury, by regular order and succession. The next question was asked differently from what it had ever been in any of the former Minutes, which stands thus: Ques. Who had been elected by the unanimous suffrages of the General Conference to superintend the Methodist Connection in America? Ans. Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury. §

66

Both Lee, as above, and Bangs give the clause, " by regular order and succession," though it is not contained in

*Ed. of 1813, p. 62.

† Minutes, p. 69. Lee also says, “When the Minutes of this year were printed, the condition of Dr. Coke's being a bishop when in the United States," was left out.

History of the Methodists, p. 140. § Ibid., p. 142.

the reprint of the Minutes in 1813. Mr. Tyerman follows them as noted above.* The Bishops doubtless framed the two questions, as Lee says, by which Mr. Wesley's name was restored, and his powers discriminated from their own, but the substance of them was passed upon by all the Annual Conferences. Coke's testimony is decisive on this point:

On the 9th of March [he says] we began our Conference in Georgia. Here we agreed (as we have ever since in each of the Conferences) that Mr. Wesley's name should be inserted at the head of our Small Annual Minutes and also in the Form of Discpline,-in Small Minutes, as the fountain of our episcopal office; and in the Form of Discipline, as the father of the whole work, under the divine guidance. To this all the Conferences have cheerfully and unanimously agreed.

So Mr. Wesley's name stood in the American Minutes of 1789 and 1790:† before those of 1791 were issued the Founder of Methodism had joined the general assembly and church of the firstborn.

The New York Conference of 1789 voted an address to President Washington, in recognition of the new federal constitution, and the first chief magistrate elected under it. Dickins and Morrell waited on Washington, and he designated May 29 for the reception of the Bishops and the presentation of the Address. He had previously entertained them, as we have seen, under his own roof at Mount Vernon. Asbury "with great self-possession," says Morrell, "read the address in an impressive manner. The President read his reply with fluency and animation. They interchanged their respective addresses; and, after sitting a few minutes, we departed." In a few days, the other denominations followed this Methodist lead.

There is nothing else in the action of the Annual Conferences down to the assembling of the first General Conference in 1792 that affects the constitution or government of the Church sufficiently to demand notice in our history.

*Page 16. Ed. 1813, pp. 77, 90.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE COUNCIL.

HE need of a General Conference, equally with the difficulties, apparently insuperable, in the way of convening such an assembly, began to press heavily upon the Church. "If the early custom of carrying general measures from one conference to another, till all had acted upon them, still continued," remarks Stevens, it had now become. exceedingly inconvenient." Well may this judicious historian express this doubt: it is highly probable that measures of prime importance or pressing urgency were sometimes determined upon by leading Conferences, occasionally by one such body, especially if the last of the year, or by the Superintendents themselves, acting on their own responsibility. The general usage, however, was still to pass legislation through all the Conferences.

To meet the demands of the hour, the bishops-Bishop Asbury, in particular-devised the plan of "The Council," and laid it before the Conferences of 1789. This plan, after some debate and opposition, was adopted by a majority of the preachers,† as follows:

1. Our bishops and presiding elders shall be the members of this Council; provided, that the members who form the Council be never fewer than nine. And if any unavoidable circumstance prevent the attendance of a presiding elder at the Council, he shall have authority to send another elder out of his own district to represent him; but the elder so sent by the absenting elder shall have no seat in the Council without the approbation of the bishop, or bishops, and presiding elders present. And if, after the abovementioned provisions are complied with, any unavoidable circumstance or any contingencies reduce the number to less than nine, the bishop shall immediately summon such elders as do not preside, to complete the number.

2. These shall have authority to mature everything that they shall judge expedient: (1) To preserve the general union. (2) To render and preserve *Hist. M. E. Ch., III. 12. † Lee, Hist. of the Methodists, p. 149.