Letter from Kentucky

Mr. Editor: There is a very evident quickening along the columns of our Advocates, and the movement seems accelerated. The Wesleyan, at Macon, Ga., and the Nashville, seem sprung anew, and the old Southern, from the city of my heart, comes edited, evidently, in each paragraph. Our little Central, at Catlettsburg, Ky., is ever brainy—allowing a latitude and freedom from which neither it nor the Church suffers. I only speak of those that come to me. It is refreshing to get out of the ruts, and to see others do the same. To merely affect goodness, hoping credit therefor, or to endeavor a substitution of personal goodness for discoveries of the Divine goodness and wisdom—that has been a snare. But criticism and moralizing may not be the best in a casual letter. How do I like Kentucky! First rate; and all the better as the scene unfolds and the potentialities are discovered. I had an erroneous idea of the State, and particularly of the condition of Methodism up here, and confess to no little backset of feeling at the first.

Rev. Mr. Berry had died at Owensboro', in 1874, and on the 17th day of April of that year I arrived, with my family, to take his place. Owensboro' is a city of about nine thousand inhabitants. There are two Presbyterian Churches and a Cumberland Presbyterian Church, a very large Baptist Church and a Christian Church, an Episcopal Church and two Roman Catholic Churches. As I witnessed there and elsewhere the fact that Methodism, organized and operative, is, when compared with the great bulk of the Protestant population, a small faction, I found the question, "Why is it so?" irrepressible. Now I regard Methodism as unencumbered, graciously delivered from the inevitable obstructions by which other churches are hindered. The Presbyterians have that obstructive, indigestible doctrine of predestination and election dangling about their necks; the Baptists and Christians have that grotesque and repulsive way of doing things; the Episcopalians, burdened by their prolix, wearisome ceremonial, to say nothing of their isolation, from claiming to be the only Church. Yet these all hold their ground.

Methodism comes in, declaring God's goodness the same towards all—the availability of Divine grace to the soul commensurate with its utmost need, requiring nothing in the mode of its administration of rites that is an offence to taste or sensibility, and relieved of the superstition attaching to what is commonly termed worship, so she can immediately preach the gospel. Why, then, with such genial, free, and attractive doctrine and method, do we halt? Where is our weakness? I answer unhesitatingly, the lack of a Pastorate. Our preachers are estopped by an arbitrary law of displacement, from building up to any considerable extent, anywhere. By the time our preachers in charge begin to perceive the way to consolidate, and to move aggressively, they must go to another field. The consequence is, we are practically the least aggressive of any of the churches named. By the time our Bishops have made the tour of the Conferences in the fall and winter, and have made the changes compelled by the law limiting the stay of a preacher to four years—(212 years of one man's time are consumed each year, in our preachers' exchanging works)—the gospel is not sent to an additional soul. The law is predicated of nothing in Heaven above, or the earth beneath, nor of aught underneath the earth; is out of analogy with all nature and grace; and what infatuation keeps us yoked to it is beyond the reach of philosophy. A church without a pastorate must be abnormal from all the co-ordinate forces that operate the evolutions of society, must be partial in its ministry, instead of catholic, and thus become content to claim a mere fraction, instead of compassing the whole. Look around and you will see the fruits of our preaching garnered by the pastors of the land. Methodists fill up the other churches, to a considerable extent. But we hear some say that to abrogate the law will desiderate other changes in our economy. We do not see that that follows; but if it do, then let us make the other changes.

The pastoral pivot must be fixed. That is central in the order of a well-adjusted, compact, symmetrical church. A preacher-in-chargery, as a substitute for a pastorate, is as meal coffee is a substitute for genuine Java.

By the way, speaking of coffee, I have discovered it to be a cause of vertigo, and have had to yield its use. So of tea. Dr. J. Marion Sims discovered the same in regard to himself, and advised a discontinuance in 1873; but I was as much dominated by coffee as some of our brethren are by the limitation law under the name of itinerancy. Poor humanity! It seems to be its fate to be enslaved by words.

Joseph B. Cottrell.

Russellville, Ky., August 29, 1878.