1
I went downtown the next morning after I had become a certified one
hundred per cent. convert, and was met by swarms of Brothers and
Sisters who overwhelmed me with congratulations, and regaled me
with tales of their own experiences when they saw God, and of the
temptations that the Devil would now prepare for me. It seemed that I
was not yet safe; I had, so far as they knew, accepted God and was one
of His chosen children, although not a Jew, but He would still permit
Satan to have his way with me upon occasion. I was instructed to walk
humbly and with downcast eyes, not daring to look up lest I be led into
sin. The Brothers, gloating the while, seemed especially anxious that
the handsome young virgins of the town should not induce me to tread
the scarlet paths of wickedness; the Sisters were more concerned with
the Drink Demon, and the evils of playing cards and dancing. One Sister
stopped me in front of Morris Brothers’ store and, beating time with
her hand, lifted her voice in song:
“Yield not to temptation,
For yielding is sin.”
And so on.
Nearly all of them seemed to be obsessed by the conviction that at last
I had done something to justify my ancestry; that Bishop Asbury had
looked down from the Heavenly Mansions upon Brother McConnell’s revival
meeting and had approved the manner in which my conversion had been
brought about.
“The Bishop is proud of you to-day, Herbie,” said one devout Brother
who sold shoddy clothing at high prices. “Last night was a great night
for God and the Bishop.”
I did not ask him how he knew that Bishop Asbury was proud of me, nor
did I inquire into the source of his information that the conversion,
by force, of a fourteen-year-old boy was a great thing for God. I
merely said: “Yes, sir,” and went my way. But it went on day after day;
everybody in town, it seemed, had a word to say about the pride that
now swelled the heart of the Bishop as he went about among the virgins
of Heaven and lolled on a cloud strumming his golden harp and producing
platinum and diamond music. I got very tired of it, and finally, to one
old Sister who had apparently thought of nothing else for a week, I
said:
“Oh, to hell with the Bishop!”
What blasphemy! She gasped and hurried away, and long before I reached
home she had telephoned and told my mother that I had blasphemed and
cried out against God. Naturally, my mother was worried; she thought
from the tale told to her that I had gone up and down the streets of
the town shouting defiance of God and yelling open praise of the Devil
and all his works. But I told her the whole story, and she listened
without comment, and when I had finished all she said was this:
“Well, don’t say ‘hell’ to them.”
I think that was the last I ever heard from my mother about religion,
and from my father I heard even less. Once my mother asked me to
read the Bible, and although of course I had already done so, I read
it again. I read it twice, from the first absurdity of Genesis to
the final fairy tale of Revelation. But I found nothing in it that
caused me to believe that it was an inspired work, and nothing that
proved, to me, the correctness of the pretensions so freely made by
the Sisters and Brothers and the Preachers that they, and they alone,
were the representatives and accredited agents of Jesus Christ on
earth. And the sermons that I heard thereafter--the Preachers selected
single verses from the Bible and constructed elaborate harangues
around them--struck me more forcibly than ever as the trashiest sort
of poppycock and balderdash. I was no longer afraid of the Hell that
they pictured with such avidity, and I no longer thrilled to their
tales of the magnificence of Heaven, although of course to a growing
boy the presence of so many virgin angels, all apparently willing and
available, was interesting. But none of them preached the religion of
Christ; they preached hatred and revenge. They held out slight hope
of reward; instead they were prophets of torture, promising eternal
punishment for petty crimes.
2
It was about this time, also, that I began to investigate the glories
of Bishop Asbury, and to make such inquiries as I could into his
saintly virtues. We had in our library the Bishop’s Journals in three
volumes, and we had also two or three volumes of biography, all of
which I read. In later years I have read many others. Probably twenty
or thirty books, in one form or another, have been written about Bishop
Asbury, and I think that I have gone pretty thoroughly into most of
them. But most of them are senseless if not downright idiotic; they
were written by preachers and published by the Methodist Church, and
the whole slant is religious. They are based on the assumption that a
Preacher and a Bishop must of necessity be a holy man, and that all the
little idiosyncrasies and faults that give a clue to the real character
of the man, are but manifestations of the fight between God and Satan.
From an ecclesiastical point of view there can be no question of Bishop
Asbury’s greatness, for there have been few men who have left a more
definite imprint on American religious culture. There were fewer than
500 Methodists in America when he came here in 1771; when he died there
were 214,000, with good churches and great influence. He had completed
the church organization according to his own ideas, ignoring to a
large extent the plans of John Wesley as set forth by Thomas Rankin
and Thomas Coke, and he had assumed as much power as a Pope of Rome.
As a religious organizer he has had few equals, and it is a great pity
that he did so much unnecessary organizing, and that his amazing genius
should have flowered in such a futile and preposterous creation as
the present-day Methodist Church; a great pity that he could not have
developed a more flexible creed, one that would have grown as the world
grew, instead of standing stock-still and viewing the universe with
intolerant suspicion, with constant bickerings about the wishes of God
and yelping appeals to the Almighty to damn somebody.
But statistically Bishop Asbury is even greater. He preached his first
sermon in America at Philadelphia on the day he set foot on this
continent, in October, 1771, and delivered his final pronouncement
against sin on his deathbed, when, propped upon his pillows, he
expounded the twenty-first chapter of Revelation. In these forty-five
years he preached some 17,000 sermons, and probably 20,000 in his whole
life, for he began preaching when he was about fifteen or sixteen, some
three years after his conversion. The number of words that he uttered
for the Lord is simply incalculable; there is no telling how far they
would reach if they could be laid end to end.
In their methods of preaching and in their intolerance the preachers
of my boyhood, of other sects as well as Methodists, were devout and
faithful followers of Bishop Asbury. The bellowing evangelist of the
Billy Sunday and Lincoln McConnell type is his lineal ecclesiastical
descendant. He preached always at the top of his voice, for he had
great faith in exhortation, and to him the good sermon was the noisy
sermon; even to-day the Preacher who rants and raves is the one who is
regarded by his flock as nearest to God. When Bishop Asbury was not
preaching he was praying; he rose every morning at four o’clock and
prayed and read the Bible until six, when he breakfasted and set forth
on his travels. He would not sleep more than six hours a night because
Wesley had decided that six hours was enough. One day a week he fasted,
and part of another day, punishing his flesh for the greater glory of
the Lord.
This love of self-inflicted punishment affected his whole life. As
a boy he was moody and sensitive; he appears to have been of the
type that complains constantly that he is being “picked on.” He was
introspective, finding his greatest joy in self-pity, and he was never
happy, as we used to say in Missouri, unless he was miserable. His
playmates in the little English school near Birmingham called him
“parson” because of his pious lugubriousness, and when the teacher beat
him or something happened to cross him he sought solace in prayer.
References to his numerous physical ailments begin to appear in Bishop
Asbury’s Journals about 1772, when he was in his late twenties. He
had never been strong physically, and never after he came to America
was he in good health. He was apparently a hypochondriac, with all
the hypochondriac’s morbid delight in recounting his symptoms; many
pages of his Journals are filled with them. He took enormous doses of
medicine, performed slight surgical operations upon himself, and raised
great blisters on the slightest provocation, frequently blistering his
whole body from throat to abdomen. Once he preached a whole afternoon
with so many blisters that he was not able either to stand or sit,
for he had blistered not only the soles of his feet but less refined
portions of his anatomy also; he had to be propped up in the pulpit,
where he raved and ranted for hour after hour, saving many sinners. He
took no care of himself whatever, riding horseback through snowstorms
and rainstorms with biting pains in his chest, and with his stomach and
throat filled with ulcers, feverish from pain and religion.
All of these things he notes in his Journals with great gusto, and
gives long lists of the medicines he took and the measures he employed
to combat his sickness. Tartar emetic was his favorite remedy, and
of this he swallowed enormous quantities. For an ulcerated throat he
used a gargle of “sage tea, honey, vinegar and mustard, and after
that another gargle of sage, tea, alum, rose leaves and loaf sugar to
strengthen the parts.” Another favorite remedy was a diet, as he called
it, made from this remarkable formula: “one quart of hard cider, one
hundred nails, a handful of snake root, a handful of pennell seed, a
handful of wormwood.” He boiled this concoction from a quart to a pint,
and drank a wineglass of it each morning before breakfast for ten days,
meanwhile using no butter, milk or meat. He notes in his Journal that
“it will make the stomach very sick.” It will. I brewed the drink once,
and I had as soon drink dynamite; bootleg gin is nectar by comparison.
There can be little doubt that Bishop Asbury’s physical condition had
a great deal to do with his extraordinary piety, for it is true that
most of the religious leaders have had many things wrong with their
bodies, and that the sicker a man is, the more religious he is likely
to be. A man who is healthy and normal mentally and physically seldom
becomes fanatically religious. True, healthy men sometimes become monks
and preachers, but except in rare instances such men are comparatively
moderate in their views. And generally they do themselves very well in
a material way, especially if they become monks.
It was once my journalistic duty to make a daily visit to a Franciscan
monastery in Quincy, Illinois, and the good brothers remain a high
light in a somewhat drab period. Jovial and pot-bellied, they were
veritable Friar Tucks in brown bathrobes, extraordinarily hearty
eaters and drinkers, and not even at pre-Volstead banquets have I ever
received as much free food and drink as from the good Franciscans. It
was easy to see why such men as these went in for religion, but it is
not so easy to understand the motive of the Protestant minister. The
earthly rewards are nothing to speak of, and what with evolution and
one thing and another, he can no longer be certain that there is a
Heaven to go to.
The Franciscans were fascinating spectacles as they padded on their
sandaled feet through the gardens of the monastery and along the
graveled paths that led to the church next door. I became particularly
fond of Brother John--I think they called him Brother John, anyhow I
did--who might have stepped from the pages of Boccaccio. He was the
press representative of the monastery; he always answered my ring,
and through the bars of the door I could see him, waddling genially
down the corridor, puffing and rattling his keys. It always seemed
to me that Brother John was miscast; doubtless he lived a happy and
carefree life, though perhaps overly cluttered with prayer, but I
thought it a great pity that he could not have been an alderman. And
what a bartender he would have made! His paunch would have elected him
a City Father, and his fund of stories would have got him a job in any
first-class barroom. But possibly he has reformed and is now leading
some such useful life.
Brother John made but one effort to convert me and induce me to join
the Catholic Church, and when I said “Bunk!” he stopped immediately and
said that inasmuch as I would undoubtedly go to Hell he would still
take advantage of my reportorial capacity to get a little publicity
for the Church before that unfortunate event occurred. But there was
no tolerance in the attitude of my reverend relative, the Bishop. His
outstanding characteristic was intolerance; it shows in a hundred
different acts of his career; he was arbitrary and domineering. Anyone
who was well dressed or who bore any outward signs of prosperity
was offensive in his sight; he preached the gospel of poverty and
self-denial, and believed that all pleasure was wicked and that
self-inflicted suffering was heavenly bliss. He was imperious and
scornful of restraint and opposition; what he said was true he thought
was true, and that was all there was to it. When men differed with him
they were wrong, and he had no disposition to reopen any question which
he had once settled in his mind. He believed that he was appointed by
God to rule the Methodists in America, and that he was a legitimate
successor of the Apostles. In 1801 he wrote:
“I will tell the world what I rest my authority on; first, divine
authority; second, seniority in America; third, the election of the
General Conference; fourth, my ordination by Thomas Coke, Philip
William Otterbein, Richard Whatcoat and Thomas Vasey; fifth, because
the signs of an Apostle have been seen in me.”
Divine authority and the signs of an Apostle!
Yet his steadfast belief that he was so appointed was one of the
secrets of his power and influence, which were greater than that of any
other churchman of his time. We are even yet feeling their effects,
and we shall continue to feel them. There seems to be no hope, what
with Boards of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals and similar
intolerant activities, that the Methodist Church will ever become more
worthy of respect than it was in his day. Indeed, it grows worse and
worse.
Another prime factor in Bishop Asbury’s extraordinary piety, as can be
seen by the entries in his Journals and by a study of the biographies
written by other clergymen, was his terrific mental turmoil. Throughout
his whole life his mind whirled like a pinwheel; he was constantly
in what, back in Missouri, we used to call a “terrible state.” About
the time he began to be ill he started referring to himself as “Poor
Francis,” and thereafter that was the dominant note of his life. He
pitied himself because of his physical ills, and then dosed himself
with horrid medicines, and with bleedings and blisterings, making
his ailments more painful and himself an object of greater pity. He
tortured himself thus physically, and flogged his mind with constant
thoughts of his unworthiness; he was continually groveling before God,
beseeching the Almighty to put temptation in his path. These extracts
taken at random from his Journals show the trend of his thought:
“I do not sufficiently love God nor live by faith.
“I must lament that I am not perfectly crucified with God.
“I feel some conviction for sleeping too long.
“My heart is grieved and groaneth for want of more holiness.
“Unguarded and trivial conversation has brought a degree of spiritual
deadness.
“My conscience reproves me for the appearance of levity.
“A cloud rested on my mind, which was occasioned by talking and
jesting. I also feel at times tempted to impatience and pride of heart.
“My heart is still depressed for want of more religion.
“Were I to stand on my own merit, where should I go but to hell?
“Here I received a bitter pill from one of my greatest friends
[referring to his last letter from John Wesley]. Praise the Lord for my
trials also! May they be sanctified.”
Bishop Asbury preached the same doctrine of personal conversion and
sanctification that is preached by present-day Methodist ministers, and
he sought this blissful state for himself with frenzied zealousness.
At times he thought he had entered into what he called the full
fruition of a life with God; at other times he fancied himself given
up to Satan. The older he grew, the gloomier and more introspective
he became, and like most of the other great religionists he had a
pronounced streak of melancholia. He had alternating periods of
exaltation and depression; he was either soaring the heights of
religious ecstasy or floundering in the depths of sin and despair. He
did not seem able to find any middle ground in which he could obtain a
measure of peace and contentment; occasionally in his Journals he noted
that he was happy in God and at peace, but the next entry showed him
groaning in great vexation of spirit, crying out a doubt of the value
of his religious life. He yearned for a constant religious thrill, and
mourned because he could not satisfy his yearning.