Social reform as we conceive of it today would have been impossible in Wesley’s time. Society in England during the eighteenth century was rigidly structured, and the only means of advancing from one class to another was preferment, the support of a wealthy benefactor. The nobility, the city and country gentry, and the tradesmen were sharply differentiated from servants, the poor, and slaves, in that order. If you were born, for example, in the servant class, chances were you remained there the rest of your life.

Wesley and his followers did not challenge the order and hierarchy of society. They were not revolutionaries. Rather, within each class they worked to enrich the spiritual dimensions of individual men’s and women’s lives. There was one exception to Wesley’s willingness to accept the status quo—that was slavery. Wesley’s journals record his interest in the movement to abolish slavery. Serfdom, or life bondage to the land, was abolished systematically in Europe during this period; ...

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