Wesley) desires him to go to bed about a quarter after nine.[726] ’Dear Sammy’ is reminded, ’You are called to obey me as a son in the Gospel.  But who can prove that you are so called to obey any other person?’ Another helper is admonished, ’Scream no more, at the peril of your soul.  Speak with all your heart, but with a moderate voice.  It is said of our Lord, “He shall not cry”—­literally, scream.’  The helpers generally are commanded ’not to affect the gentleman.  You have no more to do with this character than with that of a dancing-master.’  And again, ‘Do not mend our rules, but keep them,’ with much more to the same effect.  His preachers in Ireland are instructed how they are to avoid falling into the dirty habits of the country and the most minute and delicate rules about personal cleanliness are laid down for them.

The congregations are ruled in almost the same lordly fashion as the preachers.  Of a certain congregation at Norwich Wesley writes, ’I told them in plain terms that they were the most ignorant, self-conceited, self-willed, fickle, untractable, disorderly, disjointed society that I knew in the three kingdoms.  And God applied to their hearts, so that many were profited, but I do not find that one was offended.’[727] At one time he had an idea that tea was expensive and unwholesome, and his people are commanded to abstain from the deleterious beverage, and so to ‘keep from sickness and pay their debts.’  ‘Many,’ he writes, ’tell me to my face I can persuade this people to anything;’ so he tried to persuade them to this.  In the same year (1746) he determines to physic them all.  ‘I thought,’ he says, ’of a kind of desperate experiment.  I will prepare and give them physic myself.’  This indefatigable man provided for their minds as well as for their souls and bodies.  He furnished them with a ‘Christian library,’ writing, abridging, and condensing many books himself, and recommending and editing others; and few, probably, of the early Methodists read anything else.

As to the Conference, Wesley clearly gave its members to understand that his autocracy was to be in no way limited by their action. ’They did not,’ he writes, ’desire the meeting, but I did, knowing that in the multitude of counsellors there is safety.  But,’ he adds significantly, ’I sent for them to advise, not to govern me.  Neither did I at any of those times divest myself of any part of that power which the providence of God cast upon me without any desire or design of mine.  What is that power?  It is a power of admitting into and excluding from the societies under my care; of choosing and removing stewards, of receiving or not receiving helpers:  of appointing them where, when, and how to help me, and of desiring any of them to meet me when I see good.’[728] They never dreamt of disobeying him.  So great was the awe which he inspired that when the Deed of Declaration was drawn up in 1784, and Wesley selected, somewhat