Stephen Mason Merrill

Stephen Mason Merrill (September 16, 1825 – November 12, 1905) was an American bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, elected in 1872.

[1] He was the fifth of eleven children and as a child the family moved to Clemont County in southwest Ohio, the birthplace of Ulysses S. Grant.

While growing up, Merrill learned the trade of shoemaking and by the time he was 17 years old (1842) he had moved to Greenfield, Ohio in Highland County.

Methodism had the society, composed of all who met regularly for prayer and fellowship; the class, a dozen or so believers that met to share religious experiences; and the band, which numbered four or five persons for intimate study and conversation.

The next year he was admitted to the Ohio Conference on trial and received the Georgetown circuit, which had 22 stops.

A year after his marriage (1849) at 24 years of age, Merrill was ordained a deacon in the Methodist Episcopal Church, North (In 1844 the Methodist Episcopal Church had split along geographical lines because of slavery and slave-holding) From 1844 to 1848, Methodism declined in membership from over one million to nearly half that number and this fractured Methodism needed additional leadership.

He was the Editor of the Western Christian Advocate (an official publication of his denomination) when elected Bishop.

He openly disapproved of the candidacy of U.S. Grant for President and printed a front-page editorial denouncing the Supreme Court's decision in the case of Lambdin P. Milligan, an Indiana man arrested and tried by military officials for treason.

Merrill, like Reid, thought that black Methodists wanted churches of their own, probably because of cruelty received from whites.

Merrill, surprisingly, eventually played a role in extending fraternal relations with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South and in furthering the "Plan of Union" with his work on denominational unity, Organic Union, published in 1892.

1878 saw his work The New Testament Idea of Hell published which was followed by The Second Coming of Christ in 1879 and Aspects of Christian Experience in 1882.

It was said that Merrill’s knowledge of Methodist Law was encyclopedic and was seconded only by that of Joshua Soule, a prolific author and leader in early American Methodism.

Soule was the author of earlier versions of The Doctrines and Disciplines of the Methodist Episcopal Church.