“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.
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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.