CHAPTER XL 



Thou who knowest all our weakness, 



Leave us not to sow alone; 

 Bid thine angel guard the furrows 



Where the precious seed is sown, 

 Till the fields are crowned with glory, 



Filled with yellow ripened ears — 

 Filled with fruit of life eternal 



From the seeds we sowed in tears. 



(Charles Wesley.) 



BLADEN Circuit in North Carolina was formed 

 in 1787 by Daniel Combs, who entered the trav- 

 eling connection the same year, and after serving the 

 Huntingdon Circuit, in Pennsylvania, in 1788, and the 

 Flanders Circuit, in New Jersey, in 1789, retired from 

 the itinerant work. He w r as succeeded on the Bladen 

 Circuit in 1788 by Thomas Hardy, who w r as also in 

 the first year of his itinerant life, and who, after serv- 

 ing the Orange Circuit, in Virginia, in 1789, desisted 

 from traveling. As the result of these tw r o years of 

 faithful labor was a membership of only thirty-five 

 whites, the circuit — under a rule adopted by the Confer- 

 ence in 1784, to discontinue those appointments for pub- 

 lic preaching which did not improve, but still to meet 

 the societies — was taken from the list of appointments, 

 and the societies visited by the preachers from the 

 Little Pedee Circuit until 1790, when it was restored, 

 and Methodism, under the blessing of God upon tlio 

 zealous labors of Jonathan Bird and his successors 



(247) 



