At any rate a Churchman may be pardoned for thinking this, for one effect of his unbounded influence was to prevent his followers from separating from the Church.  His sentiments on this point were so constantly and so emphatically expressed that the only difficulty consists in selecting the most suitable specimens.  Perhaps the best plan will be to quote a few passages in chronological order, written at different periods of his life, to show how unalterable his opinions were on this point, however much he might alter them in others.  At the very first Conference—­in 1744, only six years after his conversion—­we find him declaring (for of course the dicta of Conference were simply his own dicta), ’We believe the body of our hearers will even after our death remain in the Church, unless they are thrust out.  They will either be thrust out or leaven the Church.’  A few years later, ’In visiting classes ask everyone, “Do you go to church as often as you did?” Set the example and immediately alter any plan that interfereth therewith.  Are we not unawares, by little and little, tending to a separation from the Church?  Oh, remove every tendency thereto with all diligence.  Receive the Sacrament at every opportunity.  Warn all against niceness in hearing, a great and prevailing evil; against calling our society a Church or the Church; against calling our preachers ministers and our houses meeting-houses:  call them plain preaching-houses.  Do not license yourself till you are constrained, and then not as a Dissenter, but as a Methodist preacher.’  In 1766, ’We will not, we dare not, separate from the Church, for the reasons given several years ago.  We are not seceders....  Some may say, “Our own service is public worship.”  Yes, in a sense, but not such as to supersede the Church service.  We never designed it should!  If it were designed to be instead of the Church service it would be essentially defective, for it seldom has the four grand parts of public prayer—­deprecation, petition, intercession, and thanksgiving.  Neither is it, even on the Lord’s Day, concluded with the Lord’s Supper.  If the people put ours in the place of the Church service, we hurt them that stay with us and ruin them that leave us.’  In 1768, ’We are, in truth, so far from being enemies to the Church that we are rather bigots to it.  I dare not, like Mr. Venn, leave the parish church where I am, and go to an Independent meeting.  I advise all over whom I have any influence to keep to the Church.’  In 1777, in the remarkable sermon which he preached on laying the foundation of the City Road Chapel, after having given a succinct but graphic account of the rise and progress of Methodism, ‘we,’ he concludes, ’do not, will not, form any separate sect, but from principle remain, what we have always been, true members of the Church of England.’[732] In 1778, ’To speak freely, I myself find more life in the Church prayers than in any formal extempore prayers of Dissenters.’