But this first, or Oxford, Methodism was now a thing of the past. The Methodism that Fletcher found in England was really another and very different thing, though called by the same name. It was separated from the former, not only by a score or so of years, but by spiritual changes and developments of the most important character. The first Methodists were, above all things, students and Churchmen. They revived the observance of long neglected canons and rubrics; they moulded their lives on ascetic models, fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays, and eating no flesh during Lent except on Saturdays and Sundays. They thought and spoke much of Christian antiquity, and, like the Oxford leaders of a century later, sought in that venerable past a rule and an authority co-ordinate with Scripture. They read Thomas à Kempis and Bishop Taylor and the great High Church mystic of their own day, William Law. This Oxford Methodism, with its almost monastic rigours, its living by rule, its canonical hours of prayer, is a fair and noble phase of the many-sided life of the Church of England, and, with all its defects and limitations, claims our deep respect. But it was not the instrument by which the Church and nation were to be revived; it had no message for the world, no secret of power with which to move and quicken the masses. To do this it must become other than it was. It must die, in order to bring forth much fruit. And this death and rising again were accomplished in the spiritual change wrought in John Wesley, the leader of the earlier and of the later Methodism. What was that change? In the year 1738, on his return from Georgia, Wesley writes: "It is now two years and almost four months since I left my native country, in order to teach the Georgian Indians the nature of Christianity. But what have I learned myself meantime? Why, what I the least of all suspected: that I, who went to America to convert others, was never myself converted to God."