As it left the hands of its founder, the Wesleyan body was ...

As it left the hands of its founder, the Wesleyan body was a society, autonomous in government and independent in action, but essentially supplementary to the Established Church.

Under his successors, especially Jabez Bunting, it developed into a church itself.

Active, zealous, and resourceful, it gave a personality to the somewhat formless individualism of earlier Dissent, and it satisfied, and steadied, thousands of men and women who, but for the Wesleyan church, would, in the breakup of the old society, have drifted without direction or restraint, into vice, or crime, or revolution.

By providing a far larger sphere of action for the laity than the Church or the older denominations furnished, it brought romance and ambition into a class which, under the pressure of the new civilization, was losing both purpose and aspiration; and the Wesleyan organization-the class meeting,

the circuit, the conference, the Legal

Hundred-has powerfully affected the constitution of political parties and Trade Unions.

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