July 1, 1815 — to Alexander M’caine
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
ASB_VOL3.PDF, PDF page 638
M’Caine had located in 1806 to support his family. It seems he was not satisfied with his work at the boys’ school and wanted to travel again. Asbury had designated M’Caine as the person best qualified to write a history of early American Methodism and a commentary on the Scriptures, one to be called “The Focus.” He had modestly protested that he could not find the inspiration to get the commentary started. This letter was sent to M’Caine shortly after Mrs. M’Caine’s death and about nine months before Asbury died.
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA1
July 1, 1815
[TO ALEXANDER M’CAINE]2
My dear Son:
You cannot ride a district or circuit; you are past the meridian. Still we have work enough. Should you return to your mother’s house, the chambers of her that bore you, perhaps you might be employed orderly and quarterly in Augusta, Savannah, Columbia, Charleston, Camden, Fayette, Georgetown, Wilmington, Newbern, Norfolk. You could not be too much confined. You are very positive about the key; but where materials can be had of the very best kind, you can do it, if you give up your time and mind, and only be called off to preach. Those leisure hours might be well spent for future generations. I have been reading these fifty years, and have never seen what meeteth my mind, I mean an universal focus taken from all authors worthy of notice.
Thine the same,
FRANCIS ASBURY
T.H. Colhouer,
Sketches of the Founders of the Methodist Protestant Church, 95
Notes (2)
- July 1, 1815, Asbury met Francis Hollingsworth at Little York, Pennsylvania. He was in Philadelphia on June 25. Differences between dates of Letters and the Journal are hard to explain. (See letter to M’Caine, April 30, 1815.) ↩
- M’Caine became the writer for the reformers’ position in reference to the laity and the episcopacy. He wrote the History and Mystery of Methodist Episcopacy, the Defence of Truth and Letters on the Methodist Episcopal Church. Drinkhouse says: “Unhappily, like James O’Kelly, he was irate, somewhat overbearing, bold to bluntness and handled personal characters ungloved.” He was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1768 and was educated for the Roman Catholic priesthood. He came to America to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1788, when he was twenty. He volunteered for the ministry under William Hammett and was received into the conference in 1797. He retired in 1806, but re-entered the ministry in 1815 and traveled until 1821. After that he worked with the reformers and the Methodist Protestant Church. (Drinkhouse, History of Methodist Reform and Methodist Protestant Church, I, 176, 271.) ↩