The Deed of Declaration

The failure of the attempt in 1764 to secure the continued help of at least the evangelical clergy in the Anglican Church profoundly affected the future development of Methodism. Wesley read a paper to the Conference in 1769 in which he tells the tale of his appeal to the clergj’, and of its failure. “Out of fifty or sixty,” he said, “to whom I wrote, only three vouchsafed me an answer, so I gave this up. I can do no more. They are a rope of sand, and such they will continue.” The only response Wesley received at that time was in the shape of a request to put his societies in each parish under the control of the local clergyman, and to refrain from sending his helpers to any place “where there was a godly minister.” This was a proposal to commit spiritual suicide.

Wesley just at that moment was realising his loneliness. His early comrades were no longer at his side. Whitefield was simply a wandering evangelist, absorbed in his American work. He had no ordered plans of his own, and could take no part in the ordered plans of any one else. Moreover, he was parted from Wesley by an enduring and fatal divergence in doctriife. Wesley had to count him out as a permanent force in the Revival. Charles Wesley had practically ceased to be an itinerant, and the brothers were diverging ecclesiastically. For Charles Wesley the “Church” was more and more outbulking the Revival; while John Wesley, though still refusing to take a single uncompelled step towards separation, yet saw clearly that separation was inevitable. The Church of England no longer supplied him with helpers, and, it was clear, had no friendly intentions towards his societies.

He was himself now approaching seventy years of age. The end of his earthly labours was within measurable distance. He was not an imaginative man. He took short views. He saw clearly the things immediately round him, but had uo vision for the landscape. But there had come to him at last a sense of the greatness and continuity of his work. It would outlive him. It had grown beyond his dreams, and would still grow. And he had somehow to ensure to it order discipline, leadership, purity of doctrine, and continuity of method, after his death. He must crystallise into organic shape the tangled agencies and forces which made up the Methodism of that day. An individual dies, but an institution wisely planned is deathless. It was for Methodism, at this stage, an imperative necessity to take some definite and enduring legal form.

Wesley turned for the moment to his own Conference, and to the great order of travelling preachers. They were men of proved spiritual gifts, of heroic zeal. They were faithful to the message they carried, and loyal to Wesley himself. They were no rope of sand! So he tells them: “You are at present one body. You act in concert with each other, and by united counsels. And now is the time to consider what can be done in order to continue this union.”

While Wesley himself lived, he was a sufficient centre of union. All loyalty centred in him. His brain planned, his will decided, everything. His helpers were related to each other because they were all related to him. But he was not immortal. He must die soon, and might die at any moment. What substitute could be found for his personal influence? Where could a basis of union be discovered which Sid not rest on a single frail and dying life?

It was clear that the first condition of a union, which time could not destroy, nor shock of circumstance wreck, was loyalty to a common spiritual ideal, and this, no doubt, existed. “I take it for granted,” Wesley wrote, “union cannot be preserved by any means between those who have not a single eye. Those who aim at anything but the glory of God, and the salvation of men; who desire, or seek, any earthly thing, whether honour, profit, or ease, will not, cannot continue in the Connexion; it will not answer their design. Some, perhaps, will procure preferment in the Church. Others will turn Independents, and get separate congregations, like John Edwards and Charles Skelton. Lay your account for this, and be not surprised if some you do not suspect be of this number.”

But some practical means must be devised for giving effect to the spiritual unity which existed; and some policy must be agreed upon in advance, as a preparation for Wesley’s death. Wesley suggests a plan: —

“On notice of my death, let all the preachers in England and Ireland repair to London within six weeks. Let them seek God by solemn fasting and prayer. Let them draw up articles of agreement, to be signed by those who choose to act in concert. Let those be dismissed who do not choose it, in the most friendly manner possible. Let the remainder choose, by votes, a committee of three, five, or seven, each of whom is to be Moderator in his turn. Let the committee do what I do now: propose preachers to be tried, admitted, or excluded. Fix the places of each preacher for the ensuing year, and the time of the next Conference.”’

This, of course, was government of what may be called the Venetian type; government by a committee, certain to become a clique. It could never have supplied the basis of a great and free Church. The place of the “committee of three, five, or seven” was taiien later by the Legal Hundred: and even this device would have been too fatally rigid but for the generous interpretation given to it.

Wesley later called upon his helpers to sign a solemn “Covenant of Agreement.” It ran as follows: —

“We, whose names are underwritten, being thoroughly convinced of the necessity of a close union between those whom God is pleased to use as instruments in this glorious work, in order to preserve this union between ourselves, are resolved, God being our helper, (1) to devote ourselves entirely to God, denying ourselves, taking up our cross daily; steadily aiming at one thing, to save our own souls, and them that hear us; (2) to preach the old Methodist doctrines, and no other, contained in the Minutes of the Conference; (3) to obesrve and enforce the whole Methodist discipline, laid down in the Minutes.”’

Wesley was never in a hurry; and with the wise in- .stinct of a great leader he was content to wait until the slower minds of his followers came into perfect harmony with his own. These articles of agreement were, accordingly, brought before each of the three succeeding Conferences, and all the preachers attending them, numbering

‘Myles, p. 129. ‘lUd., p. 130. one hundred and one, signed it. Here, at last, then, was formulated a policy and a bond which provided for the organic survival of Methodism beyond its founder’s death. Fortunately this scheme was never put to the test of actual practice.

Now Wesley’s gbvernmeut was of necessity personal. He was a spiritual autocrat, though without the despotic temper or methods of an autocracy. And not content with binding his helpers together by a formal agreement, which was to run beyond his own life, he looked round him for a personal successor. The wisdom of that search may well be doubted. There could be no second Wesley. Even if a leader were discovered equal to Wesley in intellectual gifts, these would not give him Wesley’s place, or Wesley’s authority. That authority was a product of history. It was born, not of Wesley’s personal endowments, but of events, and of his personal relations to his helpers. They were his spiritual children, and his power over them was the untransferable authority of a father.

Wesley, however, in search of a helper, turned to Fletcher. In a letter to him, dated June 1773, he tells him, “I see more and more unless there be one leader, the work can never be carried on. The body of the preachers are not united, nor will any i)art of them submit to the rest. Either there must be one to preside over all, or the work will indeed come to an end.” And this, it must be noted, is after the “articles of agreement” had been drawn up and signed! There was much of unregenerate human nature still surviving, even in this order of saintly men!

Wesley proceeds to describe, with almost amusing detail, the sort of man his successor must be: —

“He must be a man of faith and love, and one that has a single eye to the advancement of the kingdom of God. He must have a clear understanding; a knowledge of men and things, particularly of the Methodist doctrine and discipline; a ready utterance; diligence and activity, with a tolerable share of health. There must be added to these, favour with the people, with the Methodists in general. For, unless God turn their eyes and their hearts towards him, he will be quite incapable of the work. He must likewise have some degree of learning; because there are many adversaries, learned as well as unlearned, whose mouths must be stopped. But this cannot be done unless he be able to meet them on their own ground.’”

•Smith, p. 456.

Then, writing to Fletcher, Wesley goes on to ask, “Has (iod provided one so qualified? Who is he? Thou aet THE MAN I” he cries. He calls upon Fletcher, “without conferring with flesh and blood,” to “come and strengthen the hands, comfort the heart, and share the labour of your affectionate friend and brother.”

Wesley held Fletcher in an esteem which at this distance of time seems extravagant. He compares him with WTiitefield — to Whitefield’s disadvantage: “He was full as much called to sound an alarm through all the nation as Mr. TMiitefield himself; nay, he was far better qualified for that important work. He had a far more striking person; equal good breeding; an equally winning address; together with a richer flow of fancy; a stronger understanding; a far greater treasure of learning, both in language, philosophy, philology, and divinity; and above all. a more deep and constant communion with the Father, and with the Son Jesus Christ.”

Fletcher’s fragile body, of course, could not have sustained for a single week the strain of labour under which Whitefield lived for nearly forty years; nor could he sway crowds in WTiitefield’s overwhelming fashion. But Fletcher’s charm for Wesley is perfectly intelligible. He had spiritual gifts which Wesley himself lacked — a glow of rapture, and of adoration, a constantly burning fire of spiritual emotion, to which Wesley could never pretend. Wesley describes in more than one well-known passage his own sober-coloured and permanent spiritual mood. To a man of his temperament Fletcher’s ardours had the oflBce of a cheerful and ever-burning fire. He brought with him the glow of a spiritual summer. Fletcher, too, reinforced the .spiritual side of Wesley’s character by that strange atmosphere, as from other worlds, which attended him. A description survives of a memorable visit Fletcher paid to one of the Conferences, which illustrates, if it does not explain, the strange spiritual influence which seemed to radiate from him. Fletcher, emaciated, feeble and ghostlike, entered the Conference leaning on the arm of his host, Mr. Ireland.

“In an instant the whole assembly stood up, and Wesley advanced to meet bis almost seraphic friend. The apparently djring

‘Tyerman, iii. p. 150.

man began to address the brave itinerants, and, before he had uttered a dozen sentences, one and all were bathed in tears. Wesley, fearing that Fletcher was speaking too much, abruptly knelt at his side and began to pray. Down fell the whole of Wesley’s preachers, and joined in the devotion of their great leader.’”

It is hardly to be wondered at that Wesley wanted the permanent companionship of a soul like that of Fletcher, and looked ou Fletcher as the fittest man to be his successor. Fletcher’s easily alarmed modesty, indeed, might well have made him recoil from any pretence of possessing that splendid catalogue of gifts and graces which Wesley declared to be necessary for his successor. But another set of virtues — his loyalty to any call of duty, his habit of intellectual obedience to Wesley — made him listen assentiugly to his great leader’s call. His reply ran: “Should Providence call you first, I shall do my best, with the Lord’s assistance, to help your brother to cover up the wreck and keep together those who are not absolutely bent to throw away the Methodist doctrine and discipline.”

But these words hardly meant all they seemed to express. Fletcher was willing to be a travelling assistant to Wesley, but as he reflected on the task of becoming his ecclesiastical heir, his modest nature took alarm. On June 9, 1776, he writes to Wesley telling him that “Your recommending me to the societies as one who might succeed you is a step to which I can by no means consent. It would make me take my horse and gallop away.”

Fletcher was not to be Wesley’s successor. He married Miss Bosanquet on November 12, 1781, and marriage with him, as with Charles Wesley, was fatal to any wide flight of labours as an evangelist. The taint of consumption, moreover was in his blood, and he died only four years afterwards.

But just when Fletcher’s failing health and invincible shrinking from a task so great made it clear he could be neither Wesley’s assistant nor his successor, Providence raised up a helper who, for the remainder of Wesley’s life, was to share with him the great task of administering the discipline and shaping the policy of Methodism.

In 1776 Wesley, while conducting a series of meetings

^Tyerman, iii. p. 247. in the West, met with Dr. Coke, who bad just been dismissed from bis curacy for employing in it many of Wesley’s own methods. Coke was of an ardent and generous temperament, with something more than a touch of natural genius. He was a Welshman, short-necked, short-bodied, big-brained; a gentleman, a scholar, and a man of means. He had a personal fortune of £1200 a year. He was twice married, and each wife brought him a fortune. At his ordination he was an arid High Churchman, who would not allow a Dissenter to defile his threshold by crossing it. But a brother clergyman lent him Wesley’s Sermons and Journals, and they deeply stirred him. They were a revelation of possibilities in religion hitherto not only unattained, but even unguessed. Coke, in a state of spiritual disquiet, came to London. He fell under Maxfleld’s influence, and was sufficiently broken in pride to learn of a godly layman the secret of faith in Christ. He had all the fire and glow natural to the Welsh genius, and religion for him became at once an ardent spiritual flame — a rebuke to all colder spirits. He went back to his Somersetshire parish, and toiled in it with an impetuous zeal too great for his astonished parishioners. They ended by drowning his voice in his own parish church with the help of the church bells. He was presently dismissed from his curacy. Shortly after he met Wesley. “I had much conversation with him,” records Wesley, “and a union then began which I trust shall never end.”

Coke was admirably fitted to be Wesley’s alter ego. Like him, he was a University man, with the habits of a scholar and the refinements of a gentleman. Like him, too, he was a tireless evangelist, and was capable of a sustained energy of labour which approached, if it did not rival, that of Wesley himself. And there is something almost dramatically opportune in the appearance of Coke. He was not only the exact man wanted, but he appeared at exactly the right moment. Many of the great problems of Methodism w’ere already solved. It had found, and formulated, its theology. After 1771 the Minutes of the Conference record no excursion into doctrine of any sort. Its ecclesiastical forms and policy, too, had already been shaped by force of circumstances. It possessed an unsurpassed hymuology. But the question had yet to be solved whether Methodism should be provincial or imperial, limited to a group of islands or a force touching all lands. It was at the moment visibly in peril of becoming parochial. Wesley was so absorbed in the three kingdoms that had had practically no vision for what lay beyond them.

But Coke had the qualities which Wesley lacked. He was Wesley’s complement. He was not simply an ardent evangelist, a great administrator, with a genius for managing men; he had what Wesley wanted — imagina- I tion. He saw earlier than Wesley himself, and with larger and surer vision, to what Methodism would grow. He saw more than the three kingdoms. He saw America, India, the West Indies. So he became what has been called “the foreign minister of Methodism.” He founded its missions, and for years shaped their policy.

Wesley entrusted him with great responsibilities. He sent him, for example, in 1782, to Ireland to preside at the Conference there, and for years not Wesley, but Coke, presided in that Conference. Coke itinerated on an even larger field than Wesley. Wesley could not, or would not, visit America, but he sent Coke there again and again as his spokesman and representative; and he crossed the Atlantic, in those days of small ships and long voyages, no less than eighteen times, and all at his own expense. He was sent out to shape, with Asbury’s companionship, the outlines of a church destined to outbulk in scale British Methodism itself. 1

But not even the great field of the United States was ’ large enough for Coke’s zeal. He planted missions in the West Indies, and before his death they numbered 15,000 members. He outlived Wesley by more than twenty years, and when an old man of sixty-five he appeared in the Wesleyan Conference and pleaded to be sent to India to found a mission there. There were no funds to start such a mission, but Coke found £G000 of his own for that purpose. He sailed with a small company of helpers, and died on the voyage. He was found dead in his cabin one morning, with a placid smile on his face. And fitly enough, the body of that tireless and daring servant of Christ’s Gospel found its resting-place in that “vast and wandering grave” — the sea.

Methodism is the product of many forces. Whitefield set it the example of an heroic aggressiveness, Fletcher coloured its theology, Charles Wesley taught it to sing, John Wesley was the central flame of its zeal, and the shaping brain of its ecclesiastical form. But Coke gave it geographical range. He forbade it to be insular.

In the meantime a great legal question, on which turned the future of Methodism, had to be settled. By 1784 there were 359 Methodist chapels in the United Kingdom. On what legal title was this great mass of property held; and what was Wesley’s legal relation to their use? Wesley’s plans seldom ran beyond the immediate thing in hand. When, in 1739, the first preaching-house at Bristol was erected, it was proposed to draw up the deed of trust “on the Presbyterian plan,” giving the trustees, that is, the right of determining who should use the building. This, of course, involved the whole question of the appointment of ministers to the chapels; and Whitefield, more alert at this point than even his great comrade, wrote to Wesley telling him: “If the trustees are to name the preachers, they may even exclude you from the house you have built. Pray let the deed be immediately cancelled.” This was done, and so a great blunder was escaped.

But Wesley had to adopt some general rule with regard to his chapels. A trust-deed was drawn up, providing that the trustees should permit Wesley himself, or such persons as he appointed, to have free use of these premises. Charles Wesley and William Grimshaw were, if they outlived Wesley, to have the same rights. After their death the chapels were to be held in trust for the sole use of such preachers as might be appointed by “the yearly Conference of the people called Methodists.”

This deed was supposed to be effective and final, but, as a matter of fact, it contained one fatal flaw. The “yearly Conference of the people called Methodists” had no legal existence or definition. It was not an entity that could sue or be sued. It was a fluctuating body, consisting of such preachers as Wesley himself chose each year to confer with him. “All this time,” said Wesley, “it depended on me alone, not only what persons should constitute the Conference, but whether there should be any Conference at all. This lay wholly in my own breast; neither the preachers nor the people having any part or lot in the matter.”

38G But a body of this vague and unsettled character, it is plain, was not a legal corporation. It was little better than a yearly accident. How could a quite undefined gathering of this kind exercise the tremendous power of determining, year by year, who should exercise pastoral authority, and discharge pastoral functions, in all the chapels of Methodism? It was essential not only to the peace but to the continued existence of Methodism that the Conference, the centre of all power, the supreme instrument of government, should be legally defined.

Many legal devices wei’e suggested: the creation of a single board of trustees, in which all chapels might be vested; the collection of all trusts, deeds, in a single office, &c. But such plans did not provide for the supreme necessity of the case, the continuity and corporate existence of a living assembly. The Conference itself was wiser than Wesley in this matter, and urged him to have an instrument prepared, defining and erecting into a legal entity “the Conference of the people called Methodists.” So far, it was little better than a phrase. An undying corporation must take its place.

Accordingly, on February 28, 1784, Wesley executed the legal document on which Methodism stands — the “Model Deed” or “Deed of Declaration.” A hundred preachers, duly named, were declared to constitute the Conference. In this bodj- was vested the iJower of the appointment of all ministers to their spheres of work which Wesley himself had hitherto exercised. The “Legal Hundred,” as it is called, has the power of filling its own ranks year by year. It is thus a continuous entity, and secures continuity of legal existence to the governing body of the Church. All chapels are held in trust for this corporation, and subject to its authority. Elsewhere than in Great Britain the various Methodist Conferences are constituted by Act of Parliament. But in Great Britain Wesley’s Legal Hundred is still the instrument by which the Conference is kept in effective existence.

The Deed of Declaration settled for ever great legal difficulties; but it created, at the moment, some bitter personal disputes.

Wesley hesitated long, for example, as to the number of preachers who should constitute the legal Conference. The number was finally settled at a hundred. Then came the question of who were to form the list. Wesley at last wrote down a hundred names with his own hand. But this arrangement left many preachers out, and the excluded men were indignant. One hundred men were named in the Deed, and ninety-one left unnamed, and the relation betwixt the two groups had a vagueness which easily bred alarms. All had hitherto held an equal place in the Conference, but the Deed seemed to rend the body in two, and to leave every second man outside the legal pale.

Some of the helpers, including the two Hampsons, took au offence so deep that they left Wesley on this account. Toke was suspected of having induced Wesley to include Duly a hundred in the Deed, and as a result came into much temporary unpopularity. The accusation reached Wesley’s ears, and he replied in emphatic Latin, “on tuU, non potuitr An attempt was made to organise the discontent of the excluded men into open revolt. Circular letters were sent out calling upon the preachers to “take a stand” at the next Conference. But when the Conference met Wesley rose, with his saintly face and white hairs and frank speech, and made a calm and persuasive explanation of his act and of the reasons for it. Then, coming straight to the point, he bade all who were of his mind to stand up. They rose to a man I

Human nature counts for much, even in good men; and there was some real peril that the hundred members of the Conference, in whom was vested all legal power, might claim pre-eminence over the other hundred, who were left without legal foothold. So the very document which was meant to bind the Conference into perpetual unity might rend it asunder. Late in 1785 Wesley, who saw this, wrote a letter which was to be read to the Conference after his death. The letter would thus come with the pathos and the authority of a message from the grave. It ran: —

“I beseech you, by the mercies of God, that you never avail yourselves of the Deed of Declaration to assume any superiority over your brethren, but let all things go on, among those itinerants who choose to remain together, exactly in the same manner as when I was with you, so far as circumstances will permit.

“In particular, I beseech you, if you ever loved me, and if you now love God and your brethren, to have no respect of persons in stationing the preachers, in choosing children for Kingswood

School, in disposing of the yearly contribution and the Preachers’ Fund, or any other of the public money; but do all things with a single eye, as I have done from the beginning.”

That letter did not reach the first Conference after Wesley’s death till it had been some hours in session, and had already passed a resolution in almost Exactly the same words. And, as a matter of fact, the spirit of Wesley’s message has ruled the administration of affairs in the British Conference ever since. It has grown to be a tradition that has the force of law. The Legal Hundred claims no separate place from the rest of the Conference. It exercises no independent power. It is practically a mere registering machine, the instrument by which the decisions of the Conference as a whole are translated into legal terms.