John and Charles Wesley began their religious labours at Oxford in the city prison, Bocardo, ministering to the prisoners, and the Journal throws a lurid light on the condition of felons, criminals, and debtors in England. The system was atrocious, there was no real control; and the jailers farmed the place and made what they could out of it. The result was that if a man paid he could do what he liked in jail; and, if he could not, he was treated just as his keepers pleased. Side by side, therefore, with the utmost squalor and misery was almost indescribable profligacy. “I visited the Marshalsea prison,” writes Wesley, “on February 3, 1753, a nursery of all manner of wickedness. O shame to man that there should be such a place, such a picture of hell upon earth! And shame to those who bear the name of Christ that there should need any prison at all in Christendom.” Let me quote an extract from a letter to the London Chronicle, Friday, Jan. 2, 1761, “Sir, of all the seats of woe on this side hell, few, I suppose, exceed or equal Newgate. If any region of horror could exceed it, a few years ago Newgate in Bristol did; so great was the filth, the stench, the misery and wickedness which shocked all who had a spark of humanity left.” The prison at Bristol had been reformed by a good keeper, who, says Wesley, “deserves to be remembered full as well as the man of Ross.” It was clean, there was no drunkenness nor brawling, no immorality, no idleness, and a decent service in the chapel. These reforms themselves shew what most prisons of the time must have been like. Another evil was smuggling: wherever a boat could land there was a conspiracy to defraud the revenue. The business, for it was nothing else, was run on the most extensive scale and the whole countryside was engaged in it. The smugglers were armed and disciplined and prepared to offer furious resistance to the officers of the Revenue. Wesley set his face sternly against the practice. “The stewards met at St. Ives, from the western part of Cornwall. The next day I began examining the society; but I was soon obliged to stop short. I found an accursed thing among them; well nigh one and all bought and sold ‘uncustomed’ goods. I therefore delayed speaking to any more till I had met them all together. This I did in the evening and told them plain, either they must put this abomination away or they would see my face no more.” This was in November, 1753. In June, 1757, Wesley was in the north at Sunderland. “I met the Society and told them plain, none could stay with us, unless he would part with all sin; particularly robbing the King, selling or buying run goods; which I would no more suffer than robbing on the highway.” In 1762 he is able to record of Cornwall: “The detestable practice of cheating the King (smuggling) is no more found in our societies, and since the accursed thing has been put away, the work of God has everywhere increased.”