About the time of the Great Awakening in America, two revivals broke out in Great Britain which profoundly affected the religious and social life of the people. One of these was in Wales where Griffith Jones was preaching in Carmarthenshire. Believing that people must be intelligent if they are to be good Christians, he founded circulating schools where thousands of children and adults learned to read the Welsh Bible. Other preachers also won many converts. In England, there was pious folk among the laity and a few spiritually-minded men like William Law among the clergy, but gambling, cock and bear fighting, profanity, and degrading theaters were among the weaknesses of the people. Drunkenness prevailed everywhere. John Wesley was born in England in 1703. Educated at Oxford, he became scrupulous in religious practices, but without an experience of the love of God in his heart. As the leader of a Holy Club of kindred spirits, he cultivated his own piety and that of his friends but gained little satisfaction. On a missionary journey to Georgia he fell in with certain Moravians who created in him a desire for greater joy and peace in religion, and in a London meeting of a religious society he “felt his heart strangely warmed.” From that time his love for Christ burned so strongly that he felt compelled to preach salvation through the love of God in Christ to all who would listen. His burning zeal was unwelcome in most Anglican pulpits, and he had to face the question of his future, though he was an ordained clergyman in the Church of England. Seeking an outlet for his new spiritual energies, Wesley carried his religious message to the Cornish miners of southwest England, preaching in the open fields to thousands of them. Wesley was reluctant to separate from the Church of England in which he had been reared, as Luther found it hard to break with Catholicism. He had a genius for organization and by forming classes of a few persons each, with a leader who could guide the formation of Christian character in each class, he trained lay leaders and lay learners at the same time, but they all remained inside the Church of England. It was decades before Wesley ventured to ordain members of a Methodist clergy. In London, he bought an old cannon foundry and fitted it up for headquarters. Methodism soon became a recognized religious and social movement.
Impact: Along with his brother Charles, the great hymnist whose music was a key attraction for many to the movement, Wesley did much to save England from the social convulsions that came later in France. Tens of thousands of persons became connected with the Methodist societies before John Wesley died. In America, they began to grow rapidly from the time Methodism started. Methodism was revolutionary in its conception of religious principles. In the Church of England, salvation was theoretically a spiritual process to be secured through worship and the sacraments of the Church. The evangelical preaching of Wesley called for definite repentance of sin, wrestling with God for forgiveness, and an experience of peace and assurance. Feeling and volition were stressed more than intellectual assent and conformity to ecclesiastical custom. Directly and indirectly, the Methodists contributed to the missionary and humanitarian enterprises of the nineteenth century.