CHAPTER XXXI. DEATH, FUNERAL, AND CHARACTER OF REV. MARTIN BOEHM.

A short time before the conference closed at Leesburgh Bishop Asbury said to me, “Henry, as soon as conference adjourns you must have the horses ready and we must go right to your father’s.” I reminded him of appointments he had sent on to Baltimore and through the eastern shore of Maryland. He said, “Never mind, we can get them filled; I tell you we must go right to your father’s.” We were then one hundred miles distant.

The reason of the sudden change in his plans I believed to be, the bishop had a presentiment or an impression that my father was dead. How else could we account for his abandoning a long list of appointments, changing his entire route, and hastening on to my father’s?

When we reached Samuel Brinkley’s, who lived about a mile from our old homestead, the mystery was solved; there we heard my father was dead. The aged Asbury wept, and I felt sad at the thought I should see him no more. I learned that he was taken sick the 17th of March, and on Monday the 23d he departed this life in great peace and triumph, so his mournful words proved true that “we should never see each other again.”

The bishop makes this record: “Friday, a cold disagreeable ride brought us across the country to Samuel Brinkley’s; here I received the first intelligence of the death of my dear old friend, Martin Boehm.”

The next day, Saturday, we passed by his new-made grave to the old homestead, where I found my mother in all the sorrows of widowhood. The bishop writes thus: “Sabbath, April 5, I preached at Boehm’s Chapel the funeral sermon of Martin Boehm, and gave my audience some very interesting particulars of his life.” His text was, “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile.” Immense was the crowd; and the occasion was one of mournful interest. The bishop drew the character of his lifetime friend with great exactness, and also that of many of his cotemporaries, particularly William Otterbein.

“Martin Boehm,” he said, “was plain in dress and manners. When age had stamped its impress of reverence upon him he filled the mind with the noble idea of a patriarch. At the head of a family, a father, a neighbor, a friend, a companion, the prominent feature of his character was goodness; you felt that he was good. His mind was strong, and well stored with the learning necessary for one whose aim is to preach Christ with apostolic zeal and simplicity.

“Martin Boehm had frequent and severe conflicts in his own mind, produced by the necessity he felt himself under of offending his Mennonist brethren by the zeal and doctrines of his ministry. Some he gained, but most of them opposed him. He had difficulties also with ‘The United Brethren.’ It was late in life that he joined the Methodists, to whom long before his wife and children had attached themselves. The head of the house had two societies to pass through to arrive at the Methodists, and his meek and quiet spirit kept him back.

“In his ministry he did not make the Gospel a charge to any one; his reward was souls and glory.

“The virtue of hospitality was practiced by his family as a matter of course, and in following the impulses of their own generous natures the members of his household obeyed the oft-repeated charge of their head to open his doors to the homeless, that the weary might be solaced and the hungry fed. And what a family was here presented to an observant visitor! Here was order, quiet, occupation. The father, if not absent on a journey of five hundred miles in cold, hunger, and privation, proclaiming the glad tidings of salvation to his dispersed German brethren, might, by his conduct under his own roof, explain to a careful looker on the secret of a parent’s success in rearing a family to the duties of piety, to the diligent and useful occupation of time, and to the uninterrupted exhibition of reflected and reciprocal love, esteem, and kindness in word and deed.

“If it is true, as generally believed, that the mother does much toward forming the character of her children, it will be readily allowed that Martin Boehm had an able help-meet in his pious wife. The offspring of this noble pair have done them honor. The son Jacob, immediately upon his marriage, took upon himself the management of the farm, that his excellent father might, ‘without carefulness,’ extend his labors more far and wide.

“A younger son, Henry, is a useful minister of the Methodist connection, having the advantage of being able to preach in English and German. We are willing to hope that the children of Martin Boehm, and his children’s children to the third, fourth, and last generations, will have cause to thank God that his house for fifty years has been a house for the welcome reception of Gospel ministers, and one in which the worship of God has been uninterruptedly preserved and practiced. O ye children and grandchildren! O rising generation, who have so often heard the prayers of this man of God in the houses of your fathers! O ye Germans to whom he has long preached the word of truth! Martin Boehm being dead yet speaketh. O hear his voice from the grave exhorting you to repent, to believe, to obey!”⁠[38]

After the bishop had finished his impressive discourse, which was listened to with tears and sighs by a numerous auditory, he called on me to speak. I endeavored to do so, but when I stood in the pulpit where I had so often beheld my father, in the church that bore his name, with my venerable mother before me, tottering over the grave, my relatives all around me, where I could look out of the window into the burying-ground and see the new-made grave of my father, my eyes filled with tears, and I was so overcome that I could only utter, “Let silence speak.”

The people were deeply affected all over the house. There was weeping from many eyes. My father was greatly beloved in life, and deeply lamented in death. I had heard the venerable Asbury often when he was great, and he was peculiarly great on funeral occasions, but then he far transcended himself.

He called upon Thomas Ware to make some observations. He had long known and loved my father, and his remarks were very touching and appropriate. The bishop then called upon Abram Keaggy, who had married my sister; but his feelings overcame him, and he sat down and wept, and thus we all wept together.⁠[39] A spectator might have said, “Behold how they loved him.”

My father was in his eighty-seventh year when he died, and had preached the Gospel fifty-five years.

It is a matter of deep regret that I am under the necessity of noticing a grave attack upon the character of my father and of the Methodist Episcopal Church, made by the historians of the “United Brethren in Christ.”⁠[40]

The attack was first made thirty-nine years after my father was in the grave, and was repeated eleven years later. So half a century after my father’s death I, an old man in my ninety-first year, am obliged to vindicate his character from those who profess to revere his memory, who eulogize him, who place him next to the great Otterbein. Beautiful garlands they bring with which to adorn their victim. These historians say:

In justice to his memory, to the Church in whose origin he was so intimately concerned, and to the truth of history, we must pause at the grave of this venerable patriarch to review an account of William Otterbein and Martin Boehm, which first appeared in the Methodist Magazine, volume vi, pp. 210-249. The sketch purports to have been furnished to Bishop Asbury a short time previous to his death, by his friend, F. Hollingsworth, the transcriber of the bishop’s journal; it has also been embodied in the history of the Methodist Episcopal Church, by Dr. Bangs, and may be found in volume ii, pp. 365-376. Here is the matter referred to:

After giving this quotation, Mr. Spayth observes:

It is a duty I owe to my venerated father, to the memory of Bishop Asbury, and to the ministers that were in charge of the Church at Boehm’s Chapel in 1802, that I should correct the misrepresentations contained in the history of the “United Brethren in Christ.”

There was a mistake in the account in the Methodist Magazine, and copied in Bangs’s history and the “History of the United Brethren.” It says the questions were asked by Martin Boehm’s son Jacob. It should have been Henry. I asked the questions, and wrote the answers. This was fifty-three years ago last March. I have the original copy with my father’s signature, and the reader can see a fac-simile of his autograph. I asked the questions, and took down the answers at the request of Bishop Asbury, who wished the history of my father. The bishop had taken down from the lips of Otterbein the answers giving his history. It was at my father’s house where the questions were asked and the answers given. To the animadversions that have been made to my statement I make the following replies: 1. It is objected that my father did not understand English, and that he wrote neither the questions nor answers. He did understand English very well. He conversed very readily in English, and had quite a library of English works, which he read with great pleasure and profit; among others, Wesley’s Sermons and Fletcher’s Checks. These were great favorites with him.

As my father was aged and infirm I wrote the questions and answers. He fully understood them both, and it was voluntary on his part, and not the least influence was exerted over him. I carefully wrote every word of the answers from his mouth, and then read them over to him, and he pronounced them correct, and then deliberately affixed his signature to them. My father was not one who would sign a document when he was ignorant of its contents, or that he knew to be untrue.

At that time neither Bishop Asbury or myself supposed it would ever be a matter of controversy. It was not obtained for any such object, or to prove my father was a Methodist, but simply to obtain his history correctly.

2. Another error is this: that his son had warped the statement. This is both uncharitable and unjust. It was not enough to hint that I took advantage of my father’s ignorance of the English language, but now I am accused of warping what he said. I would as soon have cut off my right hand. If I had been guilty of an act so mean, so unjust to my father, and so false to others, I should have despised myself all the rest of my life. The insinuation has not the semblance of truth. Those answers were not warped; there was no false coloring, but sober truth. I took them down from his lips as he answered in honest simplicity, and in the same spirit I wrote them down.

3. This historian speaks of Boehm’s Chapel being built on Martin Boehm’s land, principally by him and his German brethren, and then the Methodists denying him the privilege of his own meeting-house, etc. Now all this is a mistake. It was not built upon my father’s land, but upon that of my brother Jacob, who gave the site for the church. Nor was it built principally by my father and “the German Brethren.” I suppose he means by this the United Brethren. As a body they had nothing to do with it. My father gave something, and so might some of them; but it was built for the Methodists, and principally by the Methodists. It was not my father’s church any more than it was mine, and it is sheer nonsense to talk of the cruelty of shutting him out of his own church. No such thing ever did or could take place, simply from the fact that he never owned any church, and therefore the thing was impossible. It was built for a Methodist church, the plan was furnished by a Methodist minister, and it was deeded to the Methodist Episcopal Church. After the lapse of seventy years it is still a Methodist Episcopal Church, and their ministers still preach in it.

4. Another error is accusing the Methodists at Boehm’s Chapel of double dealing. In the first place “forming a class under a liberal construction of their rules,” so that Father Boehm, not a member, could attend a class, and then “withdrawing such liberal construction,” and bringing it to bear on Father Boehm, so he was excluded from the class-meeting and love-feast. Any one acquainted with the Methodist Discipline knows that no such thing could take place. No individual Methodist society makes and unmakes terms of membership. We have a Discipline, and the terms are fixed by the General Conference. We are not independent bodies to make rules for ourselves. Furthermore, I was there at the time, and know that no such thing ever took place. William Hunter then had charge of the circuit, an honest man as ever came from the land of Erin. He was an outspoken man, open as the light of day, and incapable of duplicity.

But to “the gist of the matter.” Father Boehm, says this writer, was entreated, “for form’s sake,” to have his name go on to the class-book nominally. So, according to this statement, he never joined the Methodists, he was only a “nominal member.” Here the Methodists are accused of deception, and my aged father of complicity with them: they pretending that he was a member, and he allowing his name to be entered as a member, all the while knowing that he was not one. My father would never have stooped to such meanness. He did not consider himself a nominal, but a real member of the Methodist Church. He was not only a member of the class, and used to meet in it, but he was a member of the Quarterly Conference; he used to meet and take a part there, by virtue of his office, as a local preacher of the Methodist Episcopal Church. He was an ordained minister and used to administer the ordinances, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

But it is said “he was entreated to do this for peace’ sake.” For whose peace? My father was not so easily persuaded to do a wrong action for the sake of peace. He always preferred purity to peace: “First pure, then peaceable.”