CHAPTER VI.

THE SUPERINTENDENCY.

S the Conference had agreed to establish a super

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intendency, and had elected two superintendents, we may pause to ask what it understood the nature of this superintendency to be.

The united testimony of the members of that Conference whose declarations have been quoted shows that the Conference understood it was adopting the sort of superintendency which Mr. Wesley had proposed.

Therefore their act must be interpreted in the light of Mr. Wesley's intention. This throws us back upon his views of Church government and ecclesiastical orders. As has been shown, he believed that Church government might be that of the independent church, or an association of churches under a presbytery, or by an episcopate supervising a number of congregations and ministers. While he believed that Christians were free to accept any of these forms of government, he preferred the episcopal. His idea of the bishopric was that it did not possess any higher order than belonged to a presbyter, and that any presbyter actually performing the duties of oversight

was a bishop; and so he considered himself at once a presbyter and as true an episcopos as any man in England or in all Europe.

With him a bishop was an overseer, and the difference between a presbyter and a bishop was one not of clerical order, but of the function of oversight. According to this, a presbyter without oversight would be a mere presbyter, but a presbyter who was engaged in overseeing would be a bishop. In other words, the distinction would not be as to order, but as to office.

Dr. Abel Stevens, the distinguished historian of Methodism, succinctly states Wesley's views in the following summary:

Bishops and presbyters, or elders, are of the same order, and have essentially the same prerogatives; but that, for convenience, some of this order may be raised to the episcopal office, and some of the functions originally pertaining to the whole order, as ordination, for example, may be confined to them; the presbyter thus elevated being but primus inter pares—the first among equals a presiding officer.*

As the American Methodists accepted Wesley's proposals, they consequently accepted his ideas and expressed intention as to the nature of the superintendency, and if so they could not have regarded their superintendents as having any higher clerical order than that of presbyters, but that they were merely presbyters charged with the duty of oversight in the Church of God.

*Stevens's History of Methodism, vol. ii, p. 221.

In his circular letter to the American Methodists, Wesley said:

As our American brethren are now totally disentangled both from the state and the English hierarchy, we dare not entangle them again, either with the one or the other. They are now at full liberty simply to follow the Scriptures and the primitive Church.

Now, his idea of the bishopric of the New Testament and of the primitive Church was simply an office of oversight filled by a presbyter, or, in other words, the work of oversight performed by an elder, and he understood that the Methodists in the United States were following his idea of "the New Testament plan" of Church government.*

The American Methodists of that day professed to follow the principles of the primitive Christian Church, and Ezekiel Cooper, who was present at the first meeting of Coke and Asbury, and who was one of the most prominent Methodist ministers of the period immediately following the organization of the Methodist Episcopal Church, says:

From that time the Methodist societies in the United States became an independent Church, under the Episcopal

* In a letter written February 25, 1785, to Mr. John Stretton, of Harbor Grace, Newfoundland, Mr. Wesley says: "Last autumn Dr. Coke sailed from England, and is now visiting the flock in the midland provinces of America, and settling them on the New Testament plan, to which they all willingly and joyfully conform, being all united, as by one Spirit, so in one body" (Wesley's Works, Amer. Ed., vol. vii, p. 226).

mode and form of government-designing, professing, and resolving "to follow the Scriptures, and the primitive Church," according to the advice and counsel of Mr. Wesley.*

They knew what Mr. Wesley meant by following "the Scriptures and the primitive Church," and, in acting according to his wishes, they accepted his ideas on this point.

Dr. Coke, who presented the new arrangement to the Christmas Conference, "argued that the plan of general superintendency was in fact a species of episcopacy." Now, when he told the American preachers that the proposed "superintendency was in fact a species of episcopacy," he meant that, while it was a kind of episcopacy, it was different from some other kind or kinds of episcopacy.

That the plan of superintendency was for the purpose of oversight, and was, therefore, an episcopate, is plain, and the simple question is as to what "species of episcopacy" it was. We have seen Wesley's view. What was Coke's? On his voyage to America he made the following entry in his Journal, under date of Monday, Oct. 18, 1784:

I have waded through Bishop Hoadley's Treatises on Conformity and Episcopacy, 565 pages octavo. He is a powerful reasoner, but is, I believe, wrong in his premises. However, he is very candid. In one place he allows the truth of

* Cooper on Asbury, p. 109.

† Letter of Thomas Ware, December, 1828, published in Defense of Truth, Baltimore, 1829.

St. Jerome's account of the presbyters of Alexandria, who, as Jerome informs us, elected their own bishop for two hundred years, from the time of St. Mark to the time of Dionysius. In another place he makes this grand concession, namely: "I think not an uninterrupted line of succession of regularly ordained bishops necessary" (page 489). In several other places he grants that there may be cases of necessity which may justify a presbyterian ordination. But he really seems to prove one thing. That it was the universal practice of the Church, from the latter end of the lives of the apostles to the time of the Reformation, to invest the power of ordination in a superior Church officer to the presbyters, whom the Church soon after the death of the apostles called bishop by way of eminence."

From this it is to be inferred that he did not believe in uninterrupted succession of bishops, or that a bishop was of a higher order than a presbyter, but that he was a presbyter occupying a superior office, and called bishop to distinguish this "superior church officer" from the other presbyters. It is certain that though he had been appointed superintendent by Wesley he did not consider his superintendency gave him any higher clerical order, but that he remained a presbyter. In the certificate of consecration which he gave Asbury, Coke speaks of himself as a "presbyter," and also as a "superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America," * thus acknowledging his order to be that of an elder while his office was that of a superintendent.

In a foot-note to his sermon delivered when Asbury

* Asbury's Journal, p. 378.