ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century Britain witnessed a renewed vitality to 'official' institutional Christianity, as more churches and chapels were built or restored than in any other period in the nation's history.1 This expansion took place in part in response to an unprecedented rise in population which increased from ten and a half millions, excluding Ireland, in 1801, to thirty-seven millions in 1901, but it equally embodied the unbounded energies of a people engaged upon the creation of a global Empire, which was mistress of the seas and workshop of the world. The origins of the movement for national spiritual renewal lay in the simplified Evangelical Christianity of the Wesley brothers and George Whitefield, and of their Wesleyan and Calvinistic Methodists, who preached the need for repentance and salvation from sin through the grace won for man by Christ's death upon the Cross. Both the Wesleys were Anglican clergymen, and the full separation of the Wesleyan Methodists from the Church of England only took place in 1795, after John Wesley's death.2
