Vol 2, pages 1-100 - My Primitive Methodist Ancestors

86 PRIMITIVE METHODIST CHURCH.
describing a state of things, as regards the Church, long since gone by. But our point
is, that the poverty and helplessness of the State-Church in those remote parts must
have created a condition of things needing a powerful remedy. If the official clergymen
were not merely overworked and underpaid, incompetent or spiritless but, as was too
often the case, lax in conduct, still more urgent was the need of heroic measures in order
to reach the dull and alienated minds of the people. It was of a clergyman in Cleveland,
lying intoxicated in the ditch, that one said to another, contemptuously: "Let him lig
he'll not be wanted
[lie] ; till
Sunday."
That Methodism kept Christianity alive in these northern dales Canon Atkinson
handsomely concedes. He might probably hold that Methodism was only acting as the
locum tenens until the Church should return to take up her assigned duty. But be this
as it
may, he admits the fact that, in the parts he knows so well, Methodism and
Primitive Methodism had conserved the gospel.
When, prior to his institution into his
benefice, he saw what was to be his church, littered, ill-kept, with its shabby altar,
he says
:
" I could understand the slovenly, perfunctory service once a Sunday, sometimes
relieved by none at all, and the consequent sleepy state of Church-feeling and
worship. I could well understand how the only religious life in the district should
be among and due to the Wesleyans and Primitive Methodists."*
Some of
the first travelling-preachers on the Malton Branch sent pretty full Journals
of their labours to the Magazine. From these we take an item or two that may help
us to understand how and wherefore the Word of God spread so rapidly in these parts.
One of these early workers and journalisers was William Evans. He was one of
eight who were taken out to travel by the September Quarterly Meeting of 1820,
and began his labours in the newly-formed Malton Branch. He was so zealous
a missionary that he did not stint his labours to the fulfilling of
his planned appointments.
Measured by the standard of the plan he performed works of supererogation.
He records in his Journal :
"Saturday, October 6th, 1820. Had no appointment, but being informed that
the people at Hayton were desirous to hear us, I travelled fourteen miles
and preached to them, and the Word did not fall to the :
ground three were
'
brought to the Lord, and one drunkard went off with the solemn inquiry, What
must I do to be saved " ? '
With a spirit like this, so alien from all that was perfunctory, actuating the pioneer
workers, one can the more readily understand why village societies on the Upper
Derwent and in the Vale of Pickering should multiply as fast as the cells of the yeast
plant, and that by May, 1821, N. West should be able to record that in six months four
hundred members had been added to the Malton Branch.
Another excerpt from the Journals gives us a picture of a camp meeting of the olden
time a picture worth preserving, because, like the camp meetings held on the Wrekin,
Scarth Nick, and Mow Cop itself, it was staged and framed amid grand and impressive
scenery.
God can work His " greatest wonders " in souls renewed and sins forgiven in
* Op. dt., p. 48.