8 EARLY CORRESPONDENCE OF JABEZ BUNTING In 1826 the Leeds circuit was divided, and there was great ill-feeling over the division of the Sunday school, which was not in origin a circuit or even a Methodist institution, and from the radical leaders of which serious trouble was expected. The explosion in fact came over the proposal to install an organ in the Brunswick chapel which was new, fashionable, and reputed the largest in the connexion. The law was clear that the organ might be introduced only with Conference consent after an investigation and approval by a District Meeting, and clear on almost nothing else. The Brunswick Trustees applied for the organ by a majority of 8 votes to 6 with one neutral; the Leaders' Meeting, viewing the organ as a middle-class status symbol, and thoroughly irritated by the new arrangements in the circuit and by the itinerants' refusal to entertain any representations from the local preachers, opposed it by a majority of more than twenty to one, and were upheld by the District Meeting. Bunting nevertheless persuaded a Conference committee largely composed of the same preachers who had met in the District Meeting to reverse their ver- dict. When serious opposition developed in Leeds, Conference sovereignty was demonstrated by the summoning of a Special District Meeting (attended by Bunting as President's special adviser) to settle the affairs of the circuit. This court expelled members in large numbers without trial before a Leaders' Meeting from which palatable verdicts could not have been obtained. This exercise of central authority and personal influence turned the radicals into inveterate defenders of circuit rights, led in 1828 to the formation of a secession connexion, the Leeds Protestant Methodists, and estab- lished their view of Bunting as the Methodist Pope. What kind of a man was he in fact ? (3) JABEZ BUNTING Jabez Bunting was born at Manchester, May 13,1779; and through the tender mercy of God his Saviour, born again at the same place in the year 1794. In 1799 he felt it his duty to quit the study of medicine, in which for four years he had been engaged, under the truly paternal direction of Dr. Thomas Percival; and to devote himself to the Christian Ministry among the Wesleyan Methodists, in serving whom, 'for Jesus's sake', he has now spent twentynine busy and laborious, but happy years. O may I every mourner cheer, And trouble every heart of stone; Save, under God, the souls that hear, Nor lose, in seeking them, my own; Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.139, on 01 Oct 2021 at 02:09:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068690500005018 EARLY CORRESPONDENCE OF JABEZ BUNTING 9 Nor basely from my calling fly, But for thy gospel live and die.1 THIS autograph, composed by Bunting in 1828 as he entered upon the Presidency of the Wesleyan Conference for the second time, neatly poses the two-fold biographical problem presented by his career. The Bunting of Methodist historiography was an indispens- able adjunct to the high Wesleyan doctrine of the Pastoral Office, and was invested with an appropriate aura of legend by both the champions and the opponents of that doctrine. The difficulty of penetrating to the man behind the legends—the legend of the child blessed by John Wesley himself, the young man who could not take home his bride without their being 'privileged to have Mr. Wesley's own bed for their use',2 or on the other hand the Methodist Pope and ruthless practitioner of caucus politics—is doubled by Bunting's own willingness to sink himself in[his office; not merely never basely to fly from his calling, but to regard a career principally devoted to admin- istration and public affairs as one which was in authority pastoral, given over to saving 'under God, the souls that hear'. 'I feel that I am public property,' he confessed in 1824 ;3 and the evidence of a huge correspondence confirms that by then the personality of Jabez Bunting had been completely encapsulated by the public persona of the ecclesiastical statesman, and made only one brief reappearance, upon the death of his first wife in 1835. The evidence, both of silence and of solid fact, of Bunting's early career suggests that in origin he was something different from what he speedily became. The late Dr. Scott Lidgett is said to have claimed his own place in the Wesleyan succession by affirming that as a child he had been blessed by the great Dr. Bunting, as the young Jabez had been blessed by John Wesley. In his autograph, however, it is noteworthy that Bunting makes no such claim for himself, con- venient as it would have been on the morrow of the Leeds secessions, and, in the sermon he preached for Bunting's funeral, Thomas Jackson was quite silent about the matter. Bunting's mother, a country girl from Monyash in the Peak of Derbyshire, admirably 1 Mfethodist] C[hurch] Archives] MS. Autograph by Jabez Bunting, August 30, 1828. 2 Life of Bunting, i, p. 21; M.C.A. MS. notes of the life of Jabez Bunting, July 18, 1877. In fact the newly married pair were given hospitality in the homes of substantial laymen for some months, being allotted only the room at City Road normally taken by the junior preacher and 'the use of the large drawing room ... on the second floor'. M.C.A. MSS. Jabez Bunting to George Marsden, April 21, 1804. 3 No. 58, infra. B Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.139, on 01 Oct 2021 at 02:09:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068690500005018 10 EARLY CORRESPONDENCE OF JABEZ BUNTING fitted the pattern of Wesleyan piety, and is said to have been converted by a sermon from a Methodist itinerant on his way to America, on the text 'And Jabez was more honourable than his brethren; and his mother called his name Jabez' (1 Chron. iv. 9). But his father was a different matter, and more than Jabez's son and biographer, Percy Bunting, could account for. William Bunting was a radical Manchester tailor who sent his son to not one but two Unitarian preachers for his education, and finally apprenticed him to Thomas Percival, a leading Unitarian doctor in the town; moreover Percival's great kindness (not only to Jabez, but to other Methodist preachers and their families)1 which Bunting commemorated in his autograph and in the baptismal names of his third son, did not fit the established polemic of the high Wesleyan case. It could only be suggested that 'the lapse from orthodoxy of many of the Presby- terians in England was, at that time, neither so great nor so well understood as it afterwards became', an unlikely story in Manchester in the 1790s, and that Dr. Percival was in a measure redeemed by 'very moderate' opinions in secular and ecclesiastical politics, and and by the fact that almost all his descendants returned to the communion of the Established Church.2 Still worse, one period of Methodist education which Jabez gave his own son and namesake was too embarrassing to bear mention, for it took place in the Leeds academy of James Sigston, the notorious radical and revivalist, the constitution-maker to the Leeds Protestant Methodists, whom Bunting drove from the connexion in the great clash of 1827.3 To the outward eye the young Bunting was himself a revivalist. His first public ministry was exercised in the Manchester cottage prayer-meetings, the spear-head of revival. He first preached in the streets in the doorway of an enthusiastic mechanic who thrust his hand into the fire to prove his ability to burn for Christ; the recollec- tion of his sponsor was so embarrassing to the mature Bunting that he related how he had been ultimately hanged for murder, making a false profession of innocence on the scaffold. Jabez's trial sermon as a local preacher was preached in the Manchester Band Room, a centre of revivalism, maintained by Broadhurst, the celebrated draper, whose following Bunting was to help turn out of the connexion in 1806. 1 M.C.A. MSS. Joseph Entwisle to Jabez Bunting, February 29, 1804. After Dr. Percival's death Jabez Bunting arranged his papers. M.C.A. MSS. Jabez Bunting to [Rd. Reece] November 28, 1804. 2 Life of Bunting, i, pp. 11, 25, 51. 3 It was clearly affirmed in Bunting's life-time by William L. Thornton, preacher and classical tutor at Didsbury College, who later edited Bunting's sermons, that he and young Bunting had been pupils at Sigston's academy at the same time. M.C.A. MSS. W. L. Thornton to Dr. Melson, June 20, 1845. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.139, on 01 Oct 2021 at 02:09:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068690500005018 EARLY CORRESPONDENCE OF JABEZ BUNTING 11 Bunting's own former minister, John Barber, wrote him a word of encouragement as he entered the ministry, which in retrospect could hardly have been more ironical: I am fully convinced that what our friends at Manchester call the spirit of the revival is the spirit in which we shall all live, if we wish to be useful.