These themes burdened the hearts of the "Holy Club" at Oxford
from day to day, and sent them from their cloisters to visit prisons,
preach in surrounding towns, and impart religious truth wherever a
willing recipient could be found. No sooner had John Wesley returned
from his missionary voyage to Georgia than there were unmistakable
evidences of the adaptation of the new preaching to the wants of the
people. The masses, long affected by a deplorable indifference to
religious truths and pious living, heard the earnest preaching of the
Methodists with profound attention and in such large numbers that no
impartial observer could doubt the peculiar fitness of Methodism to the
existing state of society, morals, literature, and philosophy. As a
result, the number of converts multiplied. The Established Church was
aroused to activity. Dissenters began to hope for the return of the good
days of Bunyan and Baxter and Howe.
Isaac Taylor says of the new influence, that "it preserved from
extinction and reanimated the languishing nonconformity of the last
century, which just at the time of the Methodist revival, was rapidly in
course to be found nowhere but in books.
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