VOLUME 4, BOOK 6

CHAPTER VI

METHODISM IN THE EASTERN STATES, 1804-1820

 

Review — Lee — Aaron Sandford — Ministerial Recruits — Wilbur Fisk — Importance of his Services — His Character — Edward T. Taylor, Mariners' Preacher, Boston — His Romantic History — Joshua Soule — Elijah Hedding — His Review of his Itinerant Life — George Pickering — Martin Ruter — Progress of the Church

By the superior supply of the published data of Methodism in the eastern states I have been able, thus far, to give a more thorough and consecutive record of that part of the denomination than of any other; and as most of its representative men, for the ensuing quarter of the century, have been anticipated, we can pass rapidly over the remaining outlines of our narrative. We have seen Lee preaching his first sermon in New England, at Norwalk, Conn., on the 17th of June, 1789; organizing his first class, or society, of three women, September 25, at Stratfield; receiving his first male member, the first New England Methodist layman, Aaron Sanford,[1] at Reading, December 28; welcoming his first ministerial reinforcement, Jacob Brush, George Roberts, and Daniel Smith, February 27, 1790; delivering his first sermon, in Boston, on its Common, in July; forming the first class of Massachusetts, at Lynn, February 20, 1791, and dedicating its first church there June 26, where also the first New England Conference was held August 3, 1792. We have followed him, through all the New England states, even to the remotest points of the province of Maine, and taken leave of him, at the conclusion of his great mission, in 1800, when, after eleven years of hardest labor, his cause was permanently established in every eastern state, with nearly six thousand members, and nearly fifty traveling preachers. At the end of four years more, when we last surveyed the hard-fought field, we found in it more than ten thousand Methodists, with about fifty circuits, and more than eighty itinerants.

The present period (1804-1820) opens with a host of able men in the eastern itinerancy, most of whose names are already familiar to us: Moriarty, Crowell, Crawford, Beale, Brodhead, Ruter, Hedding, Soule, Ostrander, Washburn, Pickering, Kibby, Jane, Snelling, Webb, Joshua Taylor, Munger, Heath, Hillman, Merwin, Chichester, Sabin, Kent, and many others. Recruits, not a few of whom have survived till our day, were to be rapidly added to the ranks: in 1804 Lewis Bates; in 1806 Joel Steele, Caleb Fogg, Solomon Silas; 1807 Charles Virgin, Joseph A. Merrill; 1808 Isaac Bonney, William Swaze, David Kilbourn; 1809 John Lindsey, George Gary, Benjamin R. Hoyt., Coles Carpenter, Amasa Taylor, Ebenezer F. Newell, Edward Hyde; 1811 Thomas Norris, Daniel Fillmore; 1812 Jacob Sanborn, John Adams, Thomas Tucker, Joseph Ierson; 1813 Van Rensselaer Osborn; 1814 Thomas C. Pierce, Bartholomew Otheman; 1815 John Lord, Nathan Payne; 1816 Daniel Dorchester, Moses Fifield; and, toward the close of the period, increasing numbers of familiar names, Jennison, Wiley, Hascall, Fisk, Taylor, Stoddard, Horton, Crandall, Baker — a bald list of names, but if of little interest to the general reader, yet all of them mementoes of precious memories to New England Methodists. Many others of the same dates, and of hardly less importance, could be added; but, like most of these, their historical significance belongs to a period beyond our present limits, when it will devolve upon the historian to show that not a few of the humblest of them were men of heroic character, whose travels and labors, in many instances, extended through half a century, and from Canada to Long Island Sound.

The appearance of Wilbur Fisk in the ministry in 1818, may be said to have dated a new epoch in New England Methodism. A man of intrinsic greatness; of the highest style of Christian character; of rare pulpit eloquence, full of grace, dignity, and power, he was also the first Methodist preacher of the eastern states who had the advantages of a collegiate education; a fact of no little importance among the people of New England. No man did more to redeem his Church from the imputation of ignorance, not to say the contempt, with which it had been branded among the trained clergy of those states; for, notwithstanding the ministerial competence and greatness of such men as Merritt, Ruter, Soule, and Hedding, their commission had been generally discredited, beyond their own people, for lack of academic diplomas. Fisk led up the whole Methodism of the East in educational enterprise, ministerial culture, and public influence; while his saintly life presented a model of Christian character, which impressed his entire denomination, not only in New England, but throughout all the land, for his usefulness and reputation became national. He was born in Brattleborough, Vt., in 1792, [2] joined the Church in his eleventh year, and graduated with honor at Brown University, Providence, R. I., in 1815. Like Emory, he abandoned the study of law for the itinerant ministry, in 1818, when he was sent by a presiding elder to Craftsbury Circuit, Vt. In 1819 and 1820 he was stationed at Charlestown, Mass., where his health failed, and he was reported supernumerary till 1823, when he took charge of the Vermont District; but, in the third year of his presiding eldership, was elected principal of the Wesleyan Academy, Wilbraham, Mass. In 1828 he was elected bishop of the Canada Conference, but declined the appointment that he might mature his plans of Methodist education in New England. In 1830 he was called to the presidency of the Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn., of which he was one of the founders. In 1835 his enfeebled health compelled him to make a voyage to Europe, where he officially represented American Methodism in the Wesleyan Conference. He was elected bishop of his Church while absent, but again declined the episcopal office in favor of his function as an educator. Returning, he continued his labors in the Wesleyan University with declining health, but unabated devotion, till his death. In all these positions, beyond the limits of our present period, the history of the Church will recognize him as one of the principals, if not indeed the principal representative of her great interests, a leader in her General Conferences, a tireless promoter of her education, missions, and literature, an invincible defender of her theology and polity, an orator in her pulpits and on her philanthropic platforms, a saint in her calendar.

Wilbur Fisk's person bespoke his character. It was of good size, and remarkable for its symmetry. His features were harmonious, the contour strongly resembling the better Roman outline. His eye was nicely defined, and, when excited, beamed with a peculiarly benign and conciliatory expression. His complexion was bilious, and added to the diseased indication of his somewhat attenuated features. His head was a model not of great, but of well-proportioned development. It had the height of the Roman brow, though not the breadth of the Greek. [3] His voice was peculiarly flexible and sonorous. A catarrhal disease affected it; but just enough, during most of his life, to improve its tone to a soft orotund, without a trace of nasal defect. It rendered him a charming singer, and was an instrument of music to him in the pulpit. Without appearing to use it designedly for vocal effect, it was nevertheless an important means of impression to his sermons. Few men could indicate the moral emotions more effectually by mere tones. It was especially expressive in pathetic passages.

His pulpit manner was marked, in the introduction of the sermon by dignity, but dignity without ceremony or pretension. As he advanced into the exposition and argument of his discourse, (and there were both in most of his sermons,) he became more emphatic, especially as brilliant, though brief illustrations, ever and anon, gleamed upon his logic. By the time he had reached the peroration his utterance became rapid, his thoughts were glowing, the music of his voice rung out in thrilling tones, and sometimes quivered with trills of pathos. No imaginative excitement prevailed in the audience as under Maffitt's eloquence, no tumultuous wonder as under Bascom's, none of Cookman's impetuous passion, or Olin's overwhelming power, but a subduing, almost tranquil spell, of genial feeling, expressed often by tears or half suppressed ejaculations; something of the deep but gentle effect of Summerfield combined with a higher intellectual impression.

If genius cannot be claimed for him, nor the very highest order of intellect, yet he approached both so nearly as to command the admiration of the best cultivated minds, and the almost idolatrous interest of the people. Good vigor in all his faculties, and good balance of them all, were his chief intellectual characteristics. His literary acquisitions were not great. The American collegiate course in his day was stinted. After his graduation he was too busy to study much, and he was not a great reader. His resources were chiefly in himself; in his good sense, his quick sagacity, his generous sensibilities, and his healthy and fertile imagination. He possessed the latter power richly, though it never ran riot in his discourses. It was an auxiliary to his logic, an exemplification of Dugald Stewart's remark on the intimate relation between the imagination and the reasoning faculty in a well-balanced mind. Its scintillations were the sparkles that flew about the anvil on which his logic plied its strokes. His sermons, if examined in print, would pass for good, but "second-rate" productions; that is to say, they would rank below those of Chalmers, Channing, Robert Hall, or Olin, not to speak of the majestic productions of the great French preachers; but if heard from his own lips in the pulpit, the hearer, even the educated and critical hearer, inspired by the preacher's manner and sensibility, would be disposed to assign them to the "first" class. His style, not being formed from books, was the natural expression of his vigorous and exact intellect; it was therefore remarkable for its simplicity and terseness, its Saxon purity and energy. A meretricious [shallow, superficial — DVM] sentence cannot be found in all his published writings.

He was not a metaphysician, nor a dialectician, and yet by natural disposition he was a polemic. This was a marked propensity of his mind; it was never abused into gladiatorship in the pulpit, but inclined him almost incessantly to theological discussion out of it. A jealous regard for the truth doubtless prompted it; but it had a deeper foundation; it was founded in his mental constitution. His polemical writings were not only in good temper, but models of luminous and forcible argumentation. His sermon on Calvinism may be referred to as an example. That discourse, with his sermon and lectures on Universalism, his essays on the New Haven Divinity, his sermon on the Law and the Gospel, his tract in reply to Pierrepont on the Atonement, etc., would form a volume which the Church might preserve as no ignoble memorial of both his intellectual and moral character. His Travels in Europe, though containing some examples of elaborate reflection and picturesque description, was not a volume of superior claims; it had too much of the ordinary guidebook character.

That very significant and convenient word, tact, expresses a quality which Wilbur Fisk possessed in a rare degree. He was uncommonly sagacious in perceiving, and prompt in seizing the practical advantages of his position, whatever it might be; hence his adroitness in controversy, the success of his platform addresses, his almost certain triumph in Conference debates, and the skill of his public practical schemes. His moral character was as perfect as that of any man whom it has been the writer's happiness to know. His intimate friends will admit that there is hardly a possibility of speaking too favorably of him in this respect. It has often been remarked by those who had years of personal relations with him, that they were literally at a loss to mention one moral defect that marred the perfect beauty of his nature. This is saying very much; it is saying what cannot be said of one man perhaps in a million, but it can be deliberately said of this saintly man. Serene, cheerful; exempt from selfishness, pride, and vanity; tender, yet manly in his sensibilities; confiding in his friendships; entertaining hopeful views of Divine Providence and the destiny of man; maintaining the purest and yet the most inelaborate piety, a piety that appeared to believe and enjoy and do all things good, and yet to "be careful for nothing;" he seemed to combine the distinctive charms that endear to us the beautiful characters of Fenelon and Channing, Edwards and Fletcher of Madeley. His humility was profound, and surrounded him with a halo of moral loveliness. It was not a burden of penance under which the soul bowed with self-cherished agony, still less was it a ''voluntary humility," an assumed self-abasement; but it seemed the spontaneous and tender demeanor of his spirit; it mingled with the cheerful play of his features, and gave a hallowed suavity to his very tones. It was his rare moral character, more even than his intellectual eminence, that gave him such magical influence over other minds, and rendered him so successful in the government of literary institutions. All about him felt self-respect in respecting him. To offend him was a self-infliction which even the audacity of reckless youth could not brook.

He lived for many years in the faith and exemplification of St. Paul's sublime doctrine of Christian perfection. He prized that great tenet as one of the most important distinctions of Christianity. His own experience respecting it was marked by signal circumstances, and from the day that he practically adopted it till he triumphed over death, its impress was radiant on his daily life. With John Wesley he deemed this important truth — promulgated, in any very express form, almost solely by Methodism in these days — to be one of the most solemn responsibilities of his Church, the most potent element in the experimental divinity of the Scriptures. In his earlier religious history he had felt the influence of those temptations which have betrayed so many young men from the Methodist ministry into other communions, where better worldly auspices, rather than better means of self-development or usefulness, were to be found; but when he received the baptism of this great grace, his purified heart could not sufficiently utter its thankfulness that he had been providentially kept within the pale of a Church which clearly taught it. This alone was a denominational distinction sufficiently important to be set off against any drawback that Methodism might present. In a letter to a brother clergyman he expressed, with overflowing feelings, his renewed love of the Church. "I thank God," he said, "that I ever saw this day. I love our Church better than ever. How glad am I that I never left it." There are two periods at which a Methodist assuredly feels no regret for his connection with the denomination: when he learns by experience what is the meaning of its instructions respecting the highest Christian life, [Perfect Love — DVM] and when death dismisses him from its communion to the Church triumphant.

On the twenty-second of February, 1839, in the forty-eighth year of his age, Wilbur Fisk received that dismission. His chamber had been for days sanctified, as it were, by the glory of the Divine Presence, and his broken utterances were full of consolation, and triumph over death. "Glorious hope!" was the last and whispered expression of his religious feelings.

Another name has been mentioned, among the additions to the New England ministry, in this period, which has become as familiar to eastern Methodists as that of Fisk, and which claims here further attention, though it pertains more fully to subsequent date of the Church; the name of a man whose life, like that of not a few others in the Methodist itinerancy, forces upon the historian the suspicion, not to say the discredit, of writing "romance" rather than fact.

During the last war between England and the United States lived, in an obscure suburb of the city of Boston, a poor but devoted English woman, who, having lost her husband soon after her emigration, depended for her subsistence on the earnings of her needle. Her neighbors were of the lowest class, ignorant and vicious. She felt, in her poverty and toils, that God might cast her lot in these unfavorable circumstances for some good purpose, and began zealously to plan for the religious improvement of her neighborhood. Among other means, she opened her small front room several times a week for a prayer-meeting, and procured the aid of her Methodist associates in conducting it. Much of the good seed thus scattered with a faith that hoped against hope, and in a soil that seemed utterly arid, produced good fruit. Among the attendants at the evening meeting was a young mariner, with an intellectual eye, a prepossessing countenance, and the generous susceptibilities of a sailor's heart. Amid the corruptions of his associates he had been noted for his temperance and excellent disposition. And yet this child of the sea had been a wanderer on its waves from his earliest years. He could scarcely trace the tie of a single family relation on earth, and had known no other friends than the ever-varying, but true-hearted companionships of the forecastle. A natural superiority of head and heart had raised him above the moral perils of his lot. His fine traits interested much the English Methodist and her religious friends, and they could not see why God would not make some use of him among his comrades. He had received no education, but could read imperfectly. She hoped that Providence would in some way provide for his future instruction; but in the midst of her anticipations he was suddenly summoned away to sea. He had been out but a short time when the vessel was seized by a British ship, and carried into Halifax, where the crew suffered a long and wretched imprisonment. A year had passed away, during which the good woman had heard nothing of the young mariner. Her hopes of him were abandoned as extravagant, in view of his unsettled mode of life, and its peculiar impediments to his improvement. Still she remembered and prayed for him with the solicitude of a mother. About this time she received a letter from her kindred who had settled in Halifax, on business which required her to visit that town. While there her habitual disposition to be useful led her, with a few friends, to visit the prison with Tracts. In one apartment were the American prisoners; as she approached the grated door a voice shouted her name, calling her mother, and a youth beckoned and leaped for joy at the grate. It was the lost sailor boy. They wept and conversed like mother and son, and when she left she gave him a Bible, his future guide and comfort. During her stay at Halifax she constantly visited the prison, supplying him with religious books, and clothing, and endeavoring, by her conversation, to strengthen the religious impressions made on his mind in Boston. After some months she removed to a distant part of the province, and for years she heard nothing more of the youth. It was her happiness to reside again in Boston, in advanced life, and to find her "sailor boy" the chief attraction of its pulpit, in times when Channing, the elder Beecher, Wainwright, and other men of national reputation, were its ornaments. Such was the beginning of the long and eminent ministry of Edward T. Taylor, [4] a man whose fame for genius and usefulness became general, whose extraordinary character has been sketched in our periodicals, and the books of transatlantic visitors, [5] as one of the so-called "lions" of the city, whom a distinguished critic has pronounced the greatest poet of the land, though unable to write a stanza; and a mayor of Boston has publicly declared to be a more effectual protector of the peace of the most degraded parts of the city than any hundred policemen.

In a spacious and substantial chapel, crowded about by the worst habitations of the city, he delivered every Sabbath, for years, discourses the most extraordinary, to assemblies also as extraordinary perhaps as could be found in the Christian world. In the center column of seats, guarded sacredly against all other intrusion, sat a dense mass of mariners a strange medley of white, black, and olive Protestant, Catholic, and sometimes pagan, representing many languages, unable, probably, to comprehend each other's vocal speech, but speaking there the same language of intense looks and flowing tears. On the other seats, in the galleries, the aisles, the altar, and on the pulpit stairs, crowded, week after week, and year after year, (among the families of sailors, and the poor who had no other temple,) the of the city, the learned professor, the student, the popular writer, the actor, groups of clergymen, and the votaries of fashion, listening with throbbing hearts and wet eyes to the man whose chief training had been in the forecastle, whose only endowments were those of grace and nature, but whose discourses presented the strangest, the most jubilant exhibition of sense, epigrammatic thought, pathos, and humor, expressed in a style of singular pertinency, spangled over by an exhaustless variety of the finest images, and pervaded by a spiritual earnestness that subdued all listeners; a man who could scarcely speak three sentences, in the pulpit or out of it, without presenting a striking poetical image, a phrase of rare beauty, or a sententious sarcasm, and the living examples of whose usefulness are scattered over the seas.

He was born in Richmond, Va., about 1793; entered the American naval service as surgeon's boy in his childhood; was some time in the Spanish navy in the Mexican waters; served again in the American navy at New Orleans; went to Boston, where he joined a privateer in the war of 1812, and was taken prisoner by a British frigate while pursuing a British brig. After an imprisonment of six months he returned to Boston, and, under the ministrations of Hedding and Sabin, began his Methodist career. By the aid of the Methodist layman, Colonel Binney, he had three months' instruction at New Market (N. H.) Seminary, the only academic education of his life.

His name appears in the Minutes, for the first time, in 1819, when he was received into the New England Conference, and appointed to Scituate Circuit, among his own seafaring people, under the presiding eldership of Pickering; it embraced seven towns. In 1820 he was at Falmouth and Sandwich; in 1821 at Sandwich and Harwich; 1822 Harwich and Barnstable; 1823 Fairhaven and New Bedford; 1824 Martha's Vineyard; 1825 Milford; 1826 Bristol; 1827 and 1828 Fall River and Little Compton. In his rapidly changed appointments he had a good initiation to the labors and trials of the itinerancy. His extraordinary and somewhat eccentric genius had attracted great congregations; but he had been found chiefly useful among seamen; the Church therefore, with its usual policy of placing the right man in the right place, commissioned him in 1829, as chaplain to mariners in the metropolis of New England. His impression on the public mind of Boston was immediate and most vivid. The high culture of many of its citizens fitted them the better to appreciate the unquestionable genius and marvelous eloquence of the uncultivated preacher. He projected a mariner's Church, and, after he had labored hard in other parts of the country to collect funds for its erection, the people of Boston, without regard to sectarian distinctions, took it in hand, completed it, effectively endowed it, and gave it a "Mariner's Home," thus securing to the preacher a lifelong sphere of remarkable power to which the Church has ever since annually appointed him. [6]

During most of this period, down to 1816, when he was appointed to the Book Concern, New York, Joshua Soule was the chief itinerant in Maine, traveling, in the outset, its only district, which comprehended all its Methodist territory; with Taylor, Munger, Heath, Hillman, Baker, Fogg, Kibby, Virgin, Rater, Newell, and similar men under him. The whole state was now resounding with the sound of the gospel by their ministrations. A second district was formed, with Portland for its headquarters, in 1806, and commanded by Oliver Beale, a saintly man, of unwavering zeal and long-continued services, who became one of the principal founders of the Church in the extreme East. Soule's single district, with its thirteen circuits, and two thousand one hundred members, became, by the end of the period, three districts and twenty-seven circuits, with more than six thousand members.

Hedding labored during these times in Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine, mostly on immense districts, which extended over several of the states. About midway of the period he thus reviews his work: "I have averaged over three thousand miles' travel a year, and preached on an average a sermon a day since I commenced the itinerant life. During that period I have traveled circuits and districts that joined each other, through a tract of country beginning near Troy, N. Y., going north into Canada; thence east, through Vermont and New Hampshire and thence southerly, through Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, to Long Island Sound. I have never in this time owned a traveling vehicle, but have ridden on horseback, except occasionally in winter, when I have borrowed a sleigh, and also a few instances in which I have traveled by public conveyance or a borrowed carriage. I have both labored hard and fared hard. Much of the time I have done missionary work without missionary money. Until recently I have had no dwelling-place or home; but, as a wayfaring man, lodged from night to night where hospitality and friendship opened the way. In most of these regions the Methodists were few, and comparatively poor. I was often obliged to depend upon poor people for food and lodging and horse-keeping, and though in general they provided for me cheerfully and willingly often felt that I was taking what they needed for their children, and that my horse was eating what they needed for their own beasts. I have suffered great trials of mind on this account, and have traveled many a day in summer and winter without dinner, because I had not a quarter of a dollar that I could spare to buy it. Through nearly all this region there existed strong prejudices against the Methodists, which greatly hindered their influence and usefulness. The principal objection was on account of their doctrines. They were regarded by many as heretics in theology. They were also despised and ridiculed on account of their poverty. The Methodist preachers were often represented as exceedingly ignorant and incompetent men. The itinerant system was also another ground of objection. The circuit preacher, coming as a stranger to a new people, would often find himself beset with the most scandalous reports of crimes and shameful acts, which it was alleged he had been guilty of on former circuits, and thus the enemies of Methodism would seek to undermine his influence and destroy his usefulness. Such are some of the difficulties the Methodist preachers have been compelled to encounter, especially in New England, during the past ten years. But notwithstanding all, God has been with us, and given us favor in the eyes of the people, and great success in building up his Church. Revivals have spread through all the country, and multitudes have been added to the little and despised flock; nay, many who were once the greatest enemies of Methodism, and especially of Methodist preachers, have been converted, and are now become their greatest and truest friends. [7]

Pickering labored mostly about Boston, and on the Boston District as presiding elder, his field in the latter appointment extending from the end of Cape Cod to Providence, R. I., from Marblehead to the interior of New Hampshire; Kibby, Snelling, Webb, Munger, Merwin, Kent, Hyde, Merrill, Sabin, Brodhead, Lindsey, and many more such men, being under his command. Ruter, returning from his Canadian labors, traveled in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Maine, but mostly in New Hampshire, where he followed Hedding in 1809, on a district so large that it bore the name of the state. His self-culture was a remarkable example of the "acquisition of knowledge under difficulties," for, with all the hardships of the itinerancy, he had now become a scholarly man. His influence was important in promoting studious habits among the preachers, and, toward the end of the period, he helped to found the first Methodist academy of New England, at Newmarket., N. H., and became its first principal. The General Conference of 1820, by appointing him to the Book Concern, New York, closed his New England career; thereafter he was to tend westward, continually growing in eminence as a preacher, educator, writer, to be crowned at last by death as a pioneer missionary in the farthest southwest.

New Hampshire's single district, with its five circuits, nine preachers, and one thousand members of 1804, was to double all its numerical force before the close of these years. The period began in Vermont with some five circuits, seven preachers, and a few scattered members, under the presiding eldership of Joseph Crawford, whose district extended into Massachusetts, on the one hand, and Canada on the other. It closed there with fully doubled strength. [8] The two districts which comprehended the earlier occupied fields — Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut — at its beginning, much more than doubled all their statistics by its close.

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ENDNOTES

1 Aaron Sandford was worthy of this peculiar distinction. He was also the first class-leader, first steward, and first local preacher of New England Methodism. He and his wife's sister, Mrs. Hawley, were the first two members of Lee's second class. His house sheltered the way-worn itinerants for more than fifty years. "Here," says one of those who long knew him, "the itinerant has always found a friend and a home; here the Christian brother has always found a kindly reception, and a resting-place. He has lived to see the work of God spread around him, far and wide, beyond his most enlarged expectations. He has had ten children, nine of whom have been married, and he has had the unspeakable pleasure of seeing them all converted to God, and joined to the same Church with himself. Three of his children have died in the faith; two of His sons, with himself, are local preachers. He has about a dozen grandchildren, who are members of the Church, and one of them is now actively engaged in the itinerant ministry." He became one of the wealthy men of the town, survived, with nearly unimpaired faculties, beyond his ninetieth year, and died in the peace of the gospel, In Reading, Conn., March 29, 1847.

2 Life of Wilbur Fisk, D. D., etc., by Joseph Holdich, D. D., p.18. New York, 1842.

3. The two portraits of him which have been engraved recall his appearance well enough to those who were familiar with it, but can hardly afford an accurate impression to such as never saw him. One of them, presenting him in the primitive ministerial costume of the Church, (which he doffed, in later years,) has too much of the languor of disease. There is an aspect of debility, if not decay, about it which did not belong to the original, notwithstanding his habitual ill-health. It is preferred, however, by many of his friends to the second engraving, an English production, marked by ideal exaggerations, and not a little of that exquisite and unnatural nicety with which Wesleyan preachers are flattered in their "Magazine" portraits. There is a bust of him extant; but it is not to be looked at by any who would not mar in their memories the beautiful and benign, image of his earlier manhood by the disfigurations of disease and suffering.

4 Sketches and Incidents, etc., p. 342. New York, 1843.

5 See the American Travels of Miss Martineau, Buckingham, Miss Bremer, Mrs. Jameison, and Dickens.

6 A Boston Journal, (Z. Herald, May 8, 1867,) alluding to the Methodist ministry of the city, says: "One of their number has been the center of more idolatry on the part of the Areopagites of this Athens, as long as his strength allowed him to preach, than any of their own gods. Horace Mann joins in with Dr. Channing in his laudation; and the only elaborate eulogy of a minister ever drawn from the pen of their heresiarch, Emerson, was paid to this master workman. No name in this city's clerical annals, not that of Cotton Mather, Matthew Byles, Peter Thacher, or Lyman Beecher, will be more historic, or more justly so, for wit, imagination, and oratory, the highest gifts of intellect, no less than of the heart, than the name of Edward T. Taylor."

7 Bishop Clark's Life of Hedding, p. 202. New York, 1855.

8 Districts find circuits of New York Conference extended into Western New England, and render it next to impossible to estimate correctly the Methodist statistics of the latter.

 

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