If Christian piety was carried to a morbid excess beneath its roof, Christian charity opened its door.
The religious revival was now in full career, with Wesley for its chief apostle, organizer, and dictator, Whitefield for its great preacher, Fletcher of Madeley for its typical saint, Lady Huntingdon for its patroness among the aristocracy and the chief of its "devout women." From the pulpit, but still more from the stand of the field-preacher and through a well-trained army of social propagandists, it was assailing the scepticism, the coldness, the frivolity, the vices of the age.

English society was deeply stirred; multitudes were converted, while among those who were not converted violent and sometimes cruel antagonism was aroused.

The party had two wings, the Evangelicals, people of the wealthier class or clergymen of the Church of England, who remained within the Establishment; and the Methodists, people of the lower middle class or peasants, the personal converts and followers of Wesley and Whitefield, who, like their leaders, without a positive secession, soon found themselves organizing a separate spiritual life in the freedom of Dissent.

In the early stages of the movement the Evangelicals were to be counted at most by hundreds, the Methodists by hundreds of thousands.

So far as the masses were concerned, it was in fact a preaching of Christianity anew.