of the people. Its preachers are taken directly from the body of the people, and without any extended course of preparation, enter on their work with their previous habits of intellect and feeling still unchanged . . The people, again, are admitted to a large share of duty and responsibility in the common cause. Lay brethren are regularly employed as class leaders and exhorters, and amid volunteer prayers and exhortations, all raise, ad libitum, their fervent responses. In these respects Methodism may be characterized as the religion of the people.
    "Again, the Methodist organization should hold a place in our account of their success. No church calls its own minister, no preacher selects his own fold," Jones wrote in 1861.
    One of the people thus raised to leadership in the Methodist church was the Rev. Elijah Woolsey, circuit rider in this area in 1814. Most of the information on this man's life is found in The Supernumerary, or the Lights and Shadows of the Itinerancy, from papers of Woolsey, compiled and published by the Rev. George Coles in 1845.
    Woolsey's beginning statement in that book shows his own feelings of American patriotism: "I was born in the same year that the venerable Bishop Asbury came to this country, 1771, five years before the 'stars began to fight against Sisera, if I may so express myself, to make way for the glorious independence of our country . . In the early part of my life I had serious thoughts about my future state. At that time our country was not so well informed as it is now, and our religious privileges were vastly inferior to those of the present generation," Woolsey wrote.
    Although maintaining he was not religious in his early days, he continued, "I frequently attended public worship, both among the Presbyterians and Baptists and also among the Quakers without prejudice or respect of persons. But I cannot say that ever I heard any preaching that reached my heart until I heard the Methodists."
    Woolsey was the son of a trustee of the Presbyterian meeting house and wrote of his impression as a small boy, "having read in the Scriptures that the gospel of the kingdom must be preached in all the world for a witness and then shall the end come, I thought these preachers were great and good men and that they had begun at the southern extremity