The End of Circuit Riding
It makes sense to date the beginning of circuit riding at the Christmas Conference of 1784, but it is much more difficult to date the end of circuit riding because it was never an official category of ministry, so it never appeared in Annual Conference records. The U.S. census eliminated "frontier" as a category in 1890, but the need for "old fashioned" circuits generally ended much earlier, sometime before the U.S. Civil War. Whenever Methodist Episcopal congregations became well established, bishops would appoint clergy to groupings of small congregations rather than the territories to which earlier clergy had been appointed. Of course, this development moved west as the U.S. frontier moved west.
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Famous quotes containing the words the end of, the end, circuit and/or riding:
“This could be the day.
I could slip anchor and wander
to the end of the jetty
uncoil into the waters
a vessel of light moonglade
ride the freshets to sundown”
—Audre Lorde (1934–1992)
“Babbitt as a book was planless; its end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the writing-pad, or rather, one might suspect from its length, to the end of all writing-pads then on the market.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“The Father and His angelic hierarchy
That made the magnitude and glory there
Stood in the circuit of a needle’s eye.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature,—here they are, side by side, god and devil, mind and matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm, riding peacefully together in the eye and brain of every man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)