Letters on the Organization and Early History of the Methodist Episcopal Church (Corrected Edition, 2017)

The following letters were published in the Boston Olive Branch, in numbers, weekly; and have been widely circulated through the United States and British North American Provinces. But their great importance has made it desirable that they should be put in a form in which they can be preserved. These letters give the best history of the peculiar organization of the Methodist Episcopal Church now extant, or that can ever be published. Those old ministers, who possess many of the facts given in this book, have their reasons for keeping them from the public, as the character of the first bishops of that church are painfully implicated in these letters. Certain ecclesiastical frauds were practiced in the church in order to impose upon it a sort of Episcopacy in the revered name of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. Painful as are these truths, the author of these letters fully proves them. Methodists of the present and future generations should be informed in matters connected with the origin and present organization of their church; the historian and the general reader, also call for the truth - the whole undisguised truth. In these pages, the unvarnished tale of all the facts connected with the origin of Methodist Episcopacy is given. The letters are from the graphic pen of the reverend and venerable Alexander M'Caine, a man who has been almost three score years a minister, either in the elder or younger branch of the Methodist Church. He who flattereth with his lips is our enemy. Mr. M'Caine is not guilty of glossing over the faults of the bishops and their agents in the management of the Methodist Episcopal Church. He faithfully tells the most unpalatable truths, and fails not to make such inferences from his facts as the case may require, though they in some instances bear with terrible weight on the character of the actors in those scenes.

Such as the work is, we have felt it to be our duty to Methodists, and the world, to give it to mankind; having full permission of the author to give it a more extended circulation than that which it had in the Boston Olive Branch. In that, we printed an edition of more than twenty thousand, which have been sought after, and read perhaps more earnestly than anything else appearing in its columns. With these remarks, we submit the work to the reader, in the form of letters as received from the venerable author, and published as above described.

Thos. F. Norris.

Boston, October, 1850.

METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH.