Wesley returned from his visit to Germany burning with religious enthusiasm, and presently entered into the path which Whitefield, his friend and disciple, had opened for him. The latter, who was a few years younger than Wesley, and like him educated at Oxford, and in orders, had begun a short time before to address the people in the open air, at Kingswood near Bristol. Wesley, after some little hesitation, proceeding from his respect for ecclesiastical practice and discipline, followed his example, and commenced his field-preaching in the same place. Here was the first indication of any approach to a separation from the Church, and thus in fact were laid the foundations of the sect of Methodists; yet such was not the design, perhaps, of either of its founders,—certainly not of Wesley. His scheme, if indeed he had then proposed to himself any fixed scheme, was rather to awaken the spirit of religion slumbering within the Church,—to revive the dying embers of vital Christianity,—to infuse into the languid system new life and energy,—to place before the eyes of the people the essentials of their faith, and to rouse their religious instructors to a proper view of their profession and sense of their duty. It was rather an order than a sect that he designed to found; an order subsidiary to the Church, in rivalry indeed with the ancient branches of the Establishment, but filled with no hostile spirit, and having no final object but its regeneration. Such as were the Mendicants in respect to the Roman Church; severe in their reproaches against the indolence and degeneracy of the clergy, whether regular or secular; severe in their own professions, and for a season in their piety and practice too; making their earnest appeals to the lower classes, and turning their influence with them to their own aggrandizement; yet so far removed from schism, so far from harbouring any ill designs against the papacy, as to be the warmest zealots of the Vatican, and the most faithful ministers of all its projects:—such (so far as the change in civil and ecclesiastical principles would permit) the disciples of Wesley were probably designed to have become, in respect to the English Church, by the original intention of their master. At any rate, it was certain that the emulation, which he could not fail to rouse, would in the end be serviceable to the interests of true religion; and it is very possible that, in the depth of his enthusiasm, he held every other consideration to be entirely subordinate to this.