CHAPTER VIII.

THE BISHOPRIC FROM THE DEATH OF ASBURY TO 1844.

ISHOP ASBURY died on the last day of March, 1816, and on the twenty-third of the following month the Rev. Ezekiel Cooper, at the request of the Philadelphia Conference, delivered a funeral discourse in memory of the deceased Bishop. The sermon, with an appendix, was published in 1819 as an 18mo volume of 230 pages.

Cooper was present at the first meeting of Coke and Asbury, and was familiar with the views of the Church in those early days, and consequently his words have authority. In his sermon he declares that the founders of the denomination endeavored "to follow the Scriptures and the primitive Church; and in the appendix he calls the episcopacy of Methodism a "presbyterial episcopacy," and maintains that bishops and presbyters or elders are the "same order."+ Thus the second period of the Church's history starts out with the very declaration which the Church at its beginning had received through Wesley's letter. In a short time agitations concerning questions of polity greatly increased. The controversy referred

*Cooper on Asbury, p. 109.

+ Ibid., p. 215.

mainly to lay representation, but it also involved the episcopacy of the denomination, and the discussion called out strong writers. In 1820, the year following the publication of Cooper on Asbury, the Rev. Nathan Bangs, D.D., published his work on Methoodist Episcopacy. In this he used language which created the suspicion that he meant to imply that the bishops had a distinct order above that of the elders. That his phraseology did not represent the voice of the Church, and that he was applying the word order in a new and objectionable sense, is evident from the fact that his phrases were promptly objected to, and he was attacked so vigorously for even appearing to teach that which the Church had never taught that at last he found it necessary, in defending himself, to write and print a letter explaining his language.

In this letter, which was published in 1827, in the appendix to Emory's Defense of Our Fathers, Dr. Bangs complained that he had been misunderstood, and explained that in his use of the word order, in that connection, he gave it a special definition. He says:

I use the word order merely for convenience, to avoid circumlocution, meaning thereby nothing more than that they were invested, by consent of the eldership, with a power to preside over the flock of Christ, and to discharge other duties not so convenient for the presbyters to discharge.

This definition, of course, makes the bishopric simply an office with delegated executive powers, and Bangs takes the force out of the word order in this

connection when he says that he used it in a qualified sense, and "merely for convenience, to avoid circumlocution," and that he means this, and "nothing more." Again, he states that he means that our bishops were like those ministers in the early Christian Church who were "denominated evangelists," which certainly is not a very High Church notion. And again, in this letter, he says:

If any choose to say that we acknowledge two orders only, and a superior minister possessing a delegated jurisdiction, chiefly of an executive character, he has my full consent.

So Dr. Bangs gives his "full consent" to the declaration that "we acknowledge two orders only;" and also that a bishop is merely "a superior minister possessing a delegated jurisdiction, chiefly of an executive character," and the logical inference from this is that he held that the bishop was an executive officer, and that the bishopric was an office, and not a clerical order above the eldership. We should not overlook the fact that in the above quotations from Dr. Bangs's letter, the italics, "orders, "two orders only," and "nothing more," are his own.

That he considered bishops and presbyters to be the same order is manifest from other declarations which he makes. Thus he says:

That those denominated bishops, elders, or presbyters in the apostolical writings were one and the same order of men we will now endeavor to demonstrate.*

*Bangs's Vindication of Methodist Episcopacy, p. 19.

Again, in his Original Church of Christ, published in 1836, and which has been a text-book in the course of ministerial study, he has "canceled ” some views in the Vindication. In this new work

he says:

The terms bishop, presbyter, and elder, signified, in the primitive Church, the same order of ministers. . There was, however, as it appears, this difference: the term bishop was a title of office, signifying overseer, and the word presbyter referred to the order.*

Therefore, the term bishop is not descriptive of an order superior to that of presbyter.†

It is preposterous to infer that because a minister in the Church is distinguished by different appellations he is therefore of another order. Here is an elder or presbyter who has colleagued with him several other presbyters, and who for convenience and an orderly conducting of business has an oversight of them, and is thence designated their overseer. another time a society is called to transact some business peculiar to its organization, and he is called to preside, and is on that account called their chairman or president. Up springs a novice, and stretches his throat, and cries out, "You have

At

created another order of ministers!" Does he need any arguments to refute him ? ‡

That he held the bishopric of our Church to be an office and not an order is seen also in the fact that in his History of the Methodist Episcopal Church, published in 1840, Dr. Bangs speaks of the episcopacy as *Bangs's Original Church, p. 39. Ibid, pp. 48, 49.

+ Ibid., p. 46.

an office;* and, further, from the fact that during the great discussion in the General Conference of 1844 he constantly spoke of "the office of bishop,' and the "high office of a general superintendent," and refers to the bishop as "a general officer of the Church." +

In 1827, seven years after the appearance of Bangs's Methodist Episcopacy, the Rev. John Ein ory, D.D., published A Defense of Our Fathers, and of the Original Organization of the Methodist Episcopal Church. At first sight there seems a little confusion in some of his phrases, but a careful reading and a just comparison of his statements show that the context fully qualifies his apparently unusual expressions. His object is to maintain the validity of the episcopate of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and he insists that there is nothing improper in having a service for setting apart bishops "even on the principle of two orders," for, "in this respect," he says, "both Mr. Wesley's usage and ours exactly correspond with that of the primitive Church according to Lord King," who "maintains that bishops and presbyters in the primitive Church were the same order." +

But Emory shows just how little weight he put upon the service for setting apart bishops by his indorsement of a quotation from John Dickins's pam

* Bangs's Hist. of the Methodist Episcopal Church, vol. iii. pp. 60, 78. + Debate in the General Conference of 1844, p. 98.

Emory's Defense of Our Fathers, p. 64.