Coke, THOMAS

Coke, THOMAS, Methodist bishop, born at Brecon in 1747, graduated in 1768 at Oxford, from which university he received the degree of D.C.L. in 1775. He settled as a curate in Somersetshire, but a course of open-air preaching and cottage services, initiated after his introduction to John Wesley in 1776, brought about his dismissal by his rector, and he joined the Methodists, by whom he was attached to the London circuit. In 1782 he became first president of the Irish conference, and he was elected president of the English conference in 1797 and 1805. In 1784 he was set apart by Wesley as 'superintendent' of the societies in America, to which country he made nine voyages, the last in 1803, and where his outspoken opposition to slavery aroused much hostility; in 1787 he induced the American conference to alter his title to that of bishop. In 1784 Coke had drawn up the first plan of the Methodist foreign missions, and to this cause he devoted the later years of his life with untiring zeal and skill, retaining to the last the direct control of the system he had created. He died in the Indian Ocean on a missionary voyage to Ceylon, 3d May 1814. He published, besides religious works, extracts from his American Journals (1790), a History of the West Indies (3 vols. 1808-11), and, with Henry Moore, a Life of Wesley (1792), intended to forestall Whitehead's labours, with whom the two others, being joint literary executors, had disagreed.