To Freeborn Garrettson
THE THEOLOGIAN SELF-INTERPRETED
best constituted national Church in the world) which I advise all the travelling preachers to use on the Lord's Day in all their congregations, reading the Litany only on Wednesdays and Fridays and praying extempore on all other days. I also advise the elders to administer the Supper of the Lord on every Lord's Day.
5. If any one will point out a more rational and scriptural way of feeding and guiding those poor sheep in the wilderness, I will gladly embrace it. At present I cannot see any better method than that I have taken.
6. It has, indeed, been proposed to desire the English bishops to ordain part of our preachers for America. But to this I object: (1) I desired the Bishop of London to ordain only one but could not prevail; (2) if they consented, we know the slowness of their proceedings; but the matter admits of no delay; (3) if they would ordain them now, they would likewise expect to govern them. And how grievously would this entangle us! (4) As our American brethren are now totally disentangled both from the state and from 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. And we judge it best that they should stand fast in that liberty wherewith God has so strangely made them free.
To Freeborn Garrettson* London, January 24, 1789 My Dear Brother, It signifies but little where we are, so we are but fully employed for our good Master. Whether you went, therefore, to the east, it is all one,
1. Cf. Letters, VIII, 111-12. At eighty-six Wesley's prodigious vitality began finally to fail. His letters become shorter, his handwriting, barely legible, and something of a testy temper shows through upon occasion, as it does here. Garrettson was a pioneer Methodist preacher from Maryland, who had ranged up and down the Atlantic seaboard from North Carolina to Nova Scotia in an arduous, effective ministry. At Wesley's request, he had dispatched his manuscript journal to Wesley for possible inclusion in The Arminian Magazine — and it had been lost in shipwreck! His phrase,
"finding freedom" (i.e. in preaching), was in common American speech, denoting the preacher's experience of charismatic power in utterance. The man who here berates
Garrettson for walking by whim and not rule was the same one who had had to defend himself against charges of "enthusiasm." Despite its symptoms of senility, this letter serves as an occasion for Wesley to reaffirm yet once again his lifelong ideal:
"a scriptural, rational Christian."