Comprehension had always related to Dissenters.  The term, therefore, could hardly be used in reference to men who claimed to be thorough Churchmen, who attended the services of the Church, loved its Liturgy, and willingly subscribed to all its formularies.  The Methodist Societies bore a striking resemblance to the Collegia Pietatis established in Germany by Spener about 1670, which, at all events in their earlier years, simply aimed at the promotion of Christian holiness, while they preserved allegiance to the ecclesiastical order of the day;[381] or we may be reminded of that Moravian community, by which the mind of Wesley was at one time so deeply fascinated, whose ideal, as Matter has observed, was to be ’Calviniste ici, Lutherienne la; Catholique partout par ses institutions episcopales et ses doctrines ascetiques, et pourtant avant tout Chretienne, et vraiment apostolique par ses missions.’[382] ‘At a very early period of the renewed Moravian Church,’ writes the translator of Schleiermacher’s Letters, ’invitations were sent from various quarters of Europe for godly men to labour in the National Churches.  These men did not dispense the Sacraments, but visited, prayed, read the Bible, and kept meetings for those who, without leaving the National Churches, sought to be “built up in communion” with right-minded pious persons.’[383] These words are exactly parallel to what Wesley wrote in one of his earlier works, and requoted in 1766.  ’We look upon ourselves not as the authors or ringleaders of a particular sect or party, but as messengers of God to those who are Christians in name, but heathens in heart and life, to lead them back to that from which they are fallen, to real genuine Christianity.’[384] His followers, he added, in South Britain, belong to the Church of England, in North Britain to the Church of Scotland.  They were to be careful not to make divisions, not to baptize, nor administer the Lord’s Supper.[385]

The difficulties in the way of comprehending within the National Church men such as these, and societies formed upon such principles, ought not to have been insurmountable.  Yet it must be allowed that in practice the difficulties would in no case have been found trivial.  As with Zinzendorf and his united brethren, so with Wesley and his co-workers and disciples.  Their aims were exalted, their labours noble, the results which they achieved were immense.  But intermingled with it all there was so much weakness and credulity, so much weight given to the workings of a heated and over-wrought imagination, so many openings to a blind fanaticism, such morbid extravagances, so much from which sober reason and cultivated intellect shrank with instinctive repulsion, that even an exaggerated distrust of the good effected was natural and pardonable.  Wesley’s mind, though not by any means of the highest order of capacity, was refined, well trained, and practical; Whitefield was gifted with extraordinary powers of stirring the emotions by his fervid eloquence.