A CRISIS IN METHODISM

IN the year 1848 dissatisfaction with the government of Wesleyan Methodism had gathered considerable force. Men felt that the Wesleyan Conference did not fairly represent the churches, that this Conference exercised unjustly a tyrannous despotism over local churches in the connection, and that salvation lay in a democratic extension of local government throughout the whole field of Wesleyan Methodism.

“The real question at stake was; Connexionalism or Congregationalism — the supremacy of the Conference as the final court of appeal, or of the court of the individual church.”

Certain Fly Sheets had been freely circulated among Methodists expressing not merely dissatisfaction with Dr. Jabez Bunting, who was President of the Theological Institution, but expressing a very violent antagonism to the Conference, which was likened to a Papal despotism. These anonymous and virulent pamphlets did not halt at “libellous insinuations,” and became at last so fiendishly shameful that authority was bound to interpose.

Wesleyan Methodism was travelling surely towards constitutional change, which would have been brought about in orderly fashion, had it not been for irritation caused to both sides by literary productions the spirit of which no one now defends (A New History of Methodism, vol. i, p. 431).

The Conference decided that every minister should be required to answer “brotherly questions” concerning the authorship of these virulent Fly Sheets. Three ministers, Samuel Dunn, James Everett, and William Griffith, refused to answer these questions, and were expelled.

“To some people the three were martyrs to the cause of liberty: to others they were traitors to their church. There was room for endless and acrimonious disputes.”

Thereupon followed “agitation and convulsion.” The Reformers, as they were called, rose up to assert liberal doctrines and free the church from a “Papal autocracy.” The Conservatives marshalled their legions to fight these traitors arid preserve the ancient tradition of their policy.

A large number of secessions from the mother church took place, some through the breaking up of the local societies to which the seceders were attached, or in search of the quiet that could not be found in confusion and worry, others through the inconsiderate sternness with which in the emergency the regulations and the Conference were interpreted and enforced.

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Men who were convinced of the wisdom of important changes in administration were forced into a false position by the impossibility at the time to concede any change, and could extricate themselves only by withdrawal.

On the whole, the loss of membership due directly or indirectly to this ill-conceived agitation amounted in the course of a few years to not less than a hundred thousand. . . . Others associated themselves with the expelled ministers, and formed the church of the Wesleyan Reformers, which afterwards by amalgamation helped to constitute the United Methodist Free Churches . . . (ibid., vol. i, pp. 438-9).

Thus a dispute concerning the government of a church, because of the unlovely spirit in which it had been conducted —“stubbornness, that was neither free from malice nor wise in its choice of weapons, awakened resentment, and human nature, being what it is, led inevitably to retaliation”— broadened into one of those heresy-hunting expeditions upon which no church can enter without exhaustion and disaster.

The simple matter of dispute, as Sir Thomas Browne has warned all disputants to expect, wandered at once from the particular to the general; and, in this case, was “soon obscured by the publication of a series of slanders in which little respect was shown for age or long service or purity of motive.”

In the end, exhausted by this pitiful conflict, and rent by schism, the Methodists set themselves to recover the simple faith of their origin — belief in conversion, and a methodical attention to religious duties.

The Reformers, rightly or wrongly, announced themselves as the true children of Methodism, proclaiming the wisdom of revivals and seeking as the supreme object of their existence the salvation of sinful and erring men by the divine miracle of conversion.

The orthodox party, rightly or wrongly, claimed to be the faithful guardians of Methodism, and kept a watchful eye upon revivals, ordering the services of the church with a far more rigid overlordship than existed in the Anglican Communion. Men tended to one camp or the other according to their temperaments, and for many years the separation was so deep and so wide that few dreamed it could ever be bridged.

Such was the nature of this agitation, and such the condition of the Wesleyan Methodist Church, in the year 1850, when William Booth, slaving hard to earn daily bread in London, was an obscure and discouraged lay preacher in its ranks, of whom neither the pontifical Dr. Bunting nor the rebellious and expelled Samuel Dunn — who had been his own minister in Nottingham — took the least account.

Chapter 10

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