ABSTRACT
In the following account of the communion service held at the Primitive Methodist Conference at Reading on 11 June 1841 there is evident a 'primitivist' desire to imitate exactly the practices of the apostolic church, characteristic of the more popular types of Nonconformity. Baptist Wriothesley Noel came from a prominent aristocratic Evangelical Anglican family, served in London as minister of the Anglican proprietary chapel at St John's, Bedford Row, and was a prolific author. On 9 August 1849 he was baptised as a believer in John Street Chapel, where he subsequently ministered to a Baptist congregation. The Catholic Apostolic Church arose from the work of Edward Irving, a minister of the Church of Scotland in London who, after astonishing the world by announcing the imminent second coming and approving speaking in tongues, was deposed from the ministry in 1832 for Christological heresy.
