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great man's life. He preached almost daily for more than half a century. During most of this time he traveled over the continent, with hardly an intermission, from north to south and east to west, directing the growing hosts of his denomination with the skill and authority of a great captain. He was ordained bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church when thirty-nine years old, at its organization in 1784, when it comprised less than fifteen thousand members and but about eighty preachers; and he fell in 1816, in his seventy-first year, at the head of an army of more than two hundred and eleven thousand members, and more than seven hundred itinerant preachers. It has been estimated that in the forty-five years of his American ministry he preached about sixteen thousand five hundred sermons, or at least one a day, and traveled about two hundred and seventy thousand miles, or six thousand a year; that he presided in no less than two hundred and twenty-four annual conferences, and ordained more than four thousand preachers. He was, in fine, one of those men of anomalous greatness, in estimating whom the historian is compelled to use terms which would be irrelevant, as hyperbole, to most men with which he has to deal. His discrimination of character was marvelous; his administrative talents would have placed him, in civil government or in war, by the

side of Richelieu or Cesar, and his success placed him unquestionably at the head of the leading characters of American ecclesiastical history. No one man has done more for Christianity in the western hemisphere. His attitude in the pulpit was solemn and dignified, if not graceful; his voice was sonorous and commanding, and his discourses were often attended with bursts of eloquence "which spoke a soul full of God, and, like a mountain torrent, swept all before it." Notwithstanding his advanced age and shattered health he continued his travels to the last, till he had to be aided up the pulpit steps, and to sit while preaching. On the 24th of March, 1816, when unable to either walk or stand, he preached his last sermon at Richmond, Va., and on the 31st died at Spottsylvania, Va. With Wesley, Whitefield, and Coke, he ranks as one of the four greatest representative men of the Methodistic movement. In American Methodism he ranks immeasurably above all his cotemporaries and successors, in historical importance, and his eventful life affords the chief materials for the history of the Methodist Episcopal Church during half a century.

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At Wesley's conference for 1772 Captain Webb made an eloquent appeal for recruits for the ministry in America, and obtained Thomas Rankin and George Shadford. The former was a thorough "disciplinarian," a man of "iron will," and did

good service in the colonial societies, by his general enforcement of discipline. Shadford was a preacher of extraordinary unction, the "revivalist" of the times. Each of them traveled and labored indefatigably from New York to North Carolina, till the breaking out of the Revolutionary war, when they returned to England.

Meanwhile other English missionaries arrived: James Dempster, Martin Rodda, and William Glendenning; but the alarm of the approaching revolution dispersed the foreign laborers. Most of them returned to their native country, and there resumed their evangelical travels. A native ministry, however, had now providentially been raised up, consisting of gigantic men, true apostles, peculiarly fitted for the further work of the evangelization of the continent. Watters, Hatch, Abbott, Mann, Lee, Garrettson, Dickins, Dromgoole, and others had either entered the itinerant ranks or were about to do so, and during the storm of the war, while Asbury alone of their foreign coadjutors remained, and, he much of the time in concealment, they bore the standard of the cross forward, sometimes into the very camps of the army. The cradle of Methodism was in fact incessantly rocked by the revolutionary storm, and it was the only form of religion that advanced in America during that dark period. In the year (1760) in which Embury and his fellow

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Palatines arrived, the Lords of Trade advised the taxing of the colonies, and the agitations of the. latter commenced. The next year James Otis, the 'morning star” of the Revolution, began his appeals in Boston for the rights of the people. The following year the whole continent was shaken by the royal interference with the colonial judiciary, especially at New York; and Otis attacked, in the Massachusetts legislature, the English design of taxation as planned by Charles Townshend. Offense followed offense from the British ministry, and surge followed surge in the agitations of the colonies. The year preceding that in which the John-street Church was formed is memorable as the date of the Stamp Act; the Church was founded amid the storm of excitement which compelled the repeal of the act in 1766-the recognized epoch of American Methodism. The next year a new act of taxation was passed which stirred the colonies from Maine to Georgia, and "The Farmer's Letters," by John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, appeared-"the foundation rock of American politics and American statesmanship." In two years more the Massachusetts legislature "planned resistance." Samuel Adams approved of making the "appeal to heaven," of war, and British ships and troops were ordered to Boston. The first Annual Conference of American Methodism was

held in the stormy year (1773) in which the British

ministry procured the act respecting tea, which was followed by such resistance that the ships bringing that luxury were not allowed to land their cargoes in Philadelphia and New York; were only allowed to store them, not to sell them, in South Carolina, and were boarded in Boston harbor and the freight thrown into the sea. In the next year the Boston Port Bill inflamed all the colonies; "a General Congress" was held; Boston was blockaded; Massachusetts was in a "general rising;" then came the year of Lexington, and Concord, and Bunker Hill, introducing the "War of Revolution," with its years of conflict and suffering. Thus Methodism began its history in America in the storm of the Revolution; its English missionaries were arriving or departing amid the ever increasing political agitation; it was cradled in the hurricane, and hardened into vigorous youth, by the severities of the times, till it stood forth, the next year after the definitive treaty of peace, the organized "Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America." Its almost continual growth in such apparently adverse circumstances is one of the miracles of religious history. In 1776 it was equal, in both the number of its preachers and congregations, to the Lutherans, the German Reformed, the Reformed Dutch, the Associate Church, the Moravians, or the Roman Catholics. At the close of the war it ranked fourth or

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