By the preaching of the two Wesleys and of Whitefield, a large number of persons in London had been converted; and most of these had been incorporated in the Moravian bands. When Wesley went to Bristol, at the end of March, the work in London devolved, to a great extent, on his brother Charles. Disputes soon sprung up. On Easter day, Charles had a conversation with Zinzendorf “about motions, visions, and dreams, and was confirmed in his dislike to them.” On April 28, Whitefield preached in Islington churchyard; and, after he had done, Bowers, a Moravian, got up to speak. Charles Wesley says: “I conjured him not; but he beat me down, and followed _his impulse_.” On the 16th of May, a dispute arose, in the Moravian meeting at Fetter Lane, about lay preaching. Many were zealous for it; but Whitefield and Charles Wesley declared against it. In June, another Moravian, John Shaw, “the self-ordained priest,” as Charles Wesley calls him, “was brimful of proud wrath and fierceness”; and two others, Bowers and Bray, whom Whitefield designated “two grand enthusiasts,” followed Charles to Blendon, “drunk with the spirit of delusion.” In the Moravian society, Shaw “pleaded for his spirit of prophecy”; and charged Charles Wesley “with love of pre-eminence, and with making his proselytes twofold more the children of the devil than they were before.” Many misunderstandings and offences had crept in; and Wesley came from Bristol to put things right. A humiliation meeting was held at Fetter Lane; and “we acknowledged,” says Wesley, “our having grieved God by our divisions; ‘one saying, I am of Paul; another, I am of Apollos’; by our leaning again to our own works, and trusting in them, instead of Christ; by our resting in those little beginnings of sanctification, which it had pleased Him to work in our souls; and, above all, by blaspheming His work among us, imputing it either to nature, to the force of imagination and animal spirits, or even to the delusion of the devil.” Things seem to have proceeded more smoothly till about September, when, in the absence of the two Wesleys, “certain men crept in among them unawares, telling them, that they had deceived themselves, and had no true faith at all. ‘For,’ said they, ‘none has any justifying faith, who has ever any doubt or fear, which you know you have; or who has not a clean heart, which you know you have not; nor will you ever have it, till you leave off running to church and sacrament, and praying, and singing, and reading either the Bible, or any other book; for you cannot use these things without trusting in them. Therefore, till you leave them off, you can never have true faith; you can never till then trust in the blood of Christ.’”[330]