PREFACE.

For many years, and by many persons, including bishops, editors, and others, I have been importuned to publish the substance of my records and recollections of the Methodism of my day. It was judged that my great age, my intimate relations with Bishop Asbury, and my acquaintance with other pioneers and fathers of the Church, would enable me thus to preserve much desirable information which would otherwise soon be forgotten.

In 1847 the New Jersey Conference took action on the subject, and appointed a committee to confer with me in respect to my journals and other papers, and aid in preparing them for publication. The committee was a very competent one, but the members were too widely separated for any effectual result. I had concluded to abandon the design, and this volume would probably never have seen the light had not the Rev. J. B. Wakeley come to my help.

For the materials of the work I had a manuscript journal of two thousand pages. This we went over together, reviewing all my fields of labor, and drawing additional particulars from the storehouse of memory, Brother Wakeley performing the work of transcribing, arranging, and revising. Thus the journal furnished the warp and recollection the filling of what is before the reader in the shape of a book. In this way we were employed, at different times, during a period of twelve years, so that if the work has been poorly done it has not been through undue haste or the sparing of labor or pains.

Next year is the centenary of American Methodism, and this volume is a connecting link between the present and the origin of our Church, for I have heard Robert Strawbridge, who laid the foundation of Methodism in Maryland nearly a hundred years ago. From it the reader may get a good idea of primitive Methodism, and learn how our fathers toiled and “endured hardness as good soldiers,” and some, I trust, will catch their spirit of labor and self-denial for Christ and the Church.