George Pickering.

OUR engraving presents a very accurate likeness of the veteran Pickering in his latter years-it tells his characteristic simplicity-his quaint humour even lurks in the lines of the face, and the defect of his left eye has not escaped the attention of the artist.

GEORGE PICKERING is an historical name in the annals of New-England Methodism. Not great in talents, he was both original and great in character, and his was the peculiar power that pertains to character. Talents, without a definite character, are seldom of much avail; but wellmarked character, even without notable talents, has a power of its own, often the most effective power-a power that empowers every other attribute. George Pickering's long and useful career was an illustration of this characteristic effectiveness.

He was one of the strong men-the "giants of those days"-who were sent by the old Baltimore Conference to found Methodism in the Eastern States a corps of evangelists, which, headed by Jesse Lee, and continually recruited from the same Conference through the last decade of the last century, fought the first battles of Methodism in New-England. And they were battles such as the new sect encountered in no other field on

the continent. In most of its other fields Methodism did not find the ground prepossessed by traditional theological opinions. Within the Baltimore Conference, and south of it, the Anglican Church, by its similarity of creed and the absence of its clergy, during and after the Revolution, opened the way of Methodism. The West, so far as it was yet accessible, presented no theological prepossession, but welcomed the generous theology and heroic spirit of the new denomination as peculiarly congenial with its own character. The commixture of sects in the Middle States afforded it fair play there. But in the East it was treated by the official guardians of the "standing order" as an heretical and unconscionably pertinacious intruder. NewEngland was everywhere defined into parishes, and supplied with a "settled ministry." The "minister" ranked as the highest personage of the village, the magistrate and deacon ranging next in order. The people were taxed for the support of the hereditary faith. That faith was inveterately Calvinistic, and was shocked at the Arminianism of Methodism.

The appearance, in such a field as this, of a few men in Quaker-like dress, on horseback, with their whole wardrobe and library in their saddle-bags, driving to and fro with all speed, preaching day and night, "crying aloud and sparing not," was a surprise, a mystery to the staid community, most especially to the clergy, whose parish bounds were incessantly crossed and recrossed with as little regard as if they were indeed but "imaginary lines." They were tolerated, of course, for that the law required; but in some cases they were denied everything else but toleration-even the most ordinary hospitalities. Lee records repeated visits to the same village where the

people came to the court-house to hear him, but coolly allowed him, after the discourse, to mount his horse and ride away without a single invitation to "call at any man's home." "God only knows," he wrote, "what I have had to endure;" and again he says, "If the Lord did not comfort me, in hoping against hope, or believing against appearances, I should depart from the work in this part of the world."

The men who came to the help of Lee in this formidable field were among the most effective preachers of Methodism known in that day. Dr. George Roberts, Daniel Smith, Jacob Brush, John Bloodgood, Nathaniel B. Mills, Hope Hull, Joshua Taylor, Daniel Ostrander, John Broadhead, Shadrach Bostwick, William Beauchamp, and, not the least, George Pickering, were of the number. They were "master-builders;" and the subsequent symmetry and firmness of the structure of Methodism in the East, is owing to the manner in which they laid its foundations.

Pickering was born in Talbot County, Maryland, in 1769. He was converted at the age of eighteen in St. George's Church, Philadelphia, and joined the Baltimore Conference in 1790. His first appointment was on the old Northampton Circuit, in Virginia. After a thorough induction into the hardships of itinerant life in Virginia and Maryland, he was sent by Asbury to New-England, about four years subsequent to the arrival of Lee. Lee, Cooper, Roberts, Ostrander, Mudge, and some twenty other itinerants, were now abroad in the same field, and welcomed him to their conflicts and their victories. His first appointment (1793) in the East was on Hartford (Conn.) Circuit. We give in detail his subsequent appointments—a striking example of Methodist itinerancy. In 1794, Tolland;

1795, Lynn; 1796, Boston and Needham; the following
four years, presiding elder of the New-England District,
including the whole field of Methodism in the New-Eng
land States, except Maine and Connecticut.
We can
scarcely form a conception, amid the facilities of travel-
ling in these days, of the vast journies and labours com-
prised in this extraordinary district. Commencing at Prov-
idence, it extended down the Providence River, taking in
the appointments on both its shores, to Newport; thence
it reached to the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nan-
tucket; thence it swept the whole of Cape Cod, to Prov-
incetown, and returning, took in all the eastern portion of
Massachusetts, extended to all the interior appointments
of the State, except one on its western boundary, and
penetrated through New-Hampshire to beyond the centre
of Vermont. In 1801, he was appointed to Boston, Lynn,
and Marblehead; 1802, Salisbury and Hawke; the follow-
ing four years, Boston District; 1807, the city of Boston;
1809, he was missionary at large; then on Boston District
again for four years; 1813, 1814, Boston city; the ensuing
two years, Lynn; 1817, Boston District for four years;
the next three years, missionary at large; 1824, mission-
ary at Newburyport and Gloucester; the next five years,
missionary at large; 1830, 1831, Easton and Bridgewater;
1832, Lowell; 1833, Cambridge; 1834, Worcester; 1835,
Marblehead and Salem; 1836, Charlestown; 1837, Water-
town Mission; 1838, Watertown and Waltham; 1839,
Roxbury; 1840, 1841, Weston; 1842, Saxonville; 1843,
Church-street, Boston; 1844, 1845, Medford; 1846, North
Reading remarkable record of tireless travels, labours,
and privations, in the work of his Divine Master, during
fifty-seven years! There is a severe and significant elo-

quence in this bare recital of names and dates, which no comments can enhance.

Conference of the
Down to the year

He was a member of every General Church, save two, during forty years. 1836 his name had in every instance been placed first on the New-England delegation. At that session, and also the one of 1840, it was displaced by the names of the two principal leaders of the Secession which soon followed. In 1844 he reappeared in that venerable body; it was the last session in his life, and it was his affliction to witness the deplorable scene of the division of the Church. In the General Conference of 1808, he was a member of the committee which first projected a delegated General Conference.

He was emphatically an itinerant. His early habits of travel clung to him through life. Nine years he spent as a missionary at large in the Conference-a work for which he was peculiarly fitted-and during sixteen years he travelled extended and laborious districts as a Presiding Elder.

About three miles from the village of Watertown, Mass., is a rural spot of no little landscape beauty, and memorable in the primitive history of Methodism-once the homestead of Abraham Bemis. The journals of the early Methodist preachers abound in allusions to it. Asbury, Whatcoat, Lee, Hedding, Roberts, &c., used to turn aside to it, as pilgrims to a shrine or mariners to a favourite haven. After ascending a winding road from Watertown, among hills and richly-cultivated farms, the traveller is led, by a private way, through attractive landscapes, to an unpretending but spacious and comfortable mansion, which stands on the southern side of an amphitheatre of hills.