Glasgow experiment with lay visitors who supported the work of the regular clergy. The general upsurge in lay activity at the turn of the nineteenth cen-

Romantic sensibility.37 Among early Brethren, R.M. Beverley, the former Anglican turned Dissenter, was perhaps the closest to Bowes, for he too possessed a polemical spirit which derided establishments, had social concerns and dreamt of a time when ‘all the world will be our country, and all mankind our brothers’.38 But generally those who shared Bowes’ attitude of seeking for a more demotic church order were lower in the social scale than the pioneers of the Dublin-Plymouth-Bristol axis. Among those drawn into the Brethren over the first two decades were several who shared Bowes’ aspirations.