ere sent every week to
Bridewell, and numbers were induced to emigrate to the colonies. A great
part of the fines levied for these offenses was bestowed on the poor. In
the fortieth annual report of the "Societies for the Reformation of
Manners" which appeared in 1735, it was stated that the number of
prosecutions for debauchery and profaneness in London and Westminster
alone, since the foundation of the societies, had been 99,380.

The term Methodist was a college nickname bestowed upon a small society
of students at Oxford, who met together between 1729 and 1735 for the
purpose of mutual improvement. They were accustomed to communicate every
week, to fast regularly on Wednesdays and Fridays, and on most days
during Lent; to read and discuss the Bible in common, to abstain from
most forms of amusement and luxury, and to visit sick persons and
prisoners in the gaol. John Wesley, the future leader of the religious
revival of the eighteenth century, was the master-spirit of this
society. The society hardly numbered more than fifteen members, and was
the object of much ridicule at the university; but it included some men
who afterward played considerable parts in the world. Among them was
Charles, the younger brother of John Wesley, whose hymns became the
favorite poetry of the sect, and whose gentler, more submissive, and
more amiable character, though less fitted than that of his brother for
the great conflicts of public life, was very useful in moderating the
movement, and in drawing converts to it by personal influence. Charles
Wesley appears to have originated the society at Oxford; he brought
Whitefield into its pale, and besides being the most popular poet he was
one of the most persuasive preachers of the movement.

In the course of 1738 the chief elements of the movement were already
formed. Whitefield had returned from Georgia, Charles Wesley had begun
to preach the doctrine with extraordinary effect to the criminals in
Newgate and from every pulpit into which he was admitted. Methodist
societies had already sprung up under Moravian influence. They were in
part a continuation of the society at Oxford, in part a revival of those
religious societies that have been already noticed as so common after
the Revolution. The design of each was to be a church within a church, a
seedplot of a more fervent piety, the center of a stricter discipline
and a more energetic propagandism than existed in religious communities
at l