Happily for himself, Wesley was not an actor in this humbling fracas; and yet, before the year was ended, he was involved within its meshes. In October, he spent four days at Bedford, where a Moravian congregation had been founded in 1744, and where, in 1747, “the chief labourer” startled some of the Brethren by announcing: “My brethren, we have received new orders. In London, Yorkshire, and all other places, no person is to go out of the town without the leave of the chief labourer. So it must be here. Observe, no one must go out of town, no not a mile, without leave from me.” In 1750, they built a chapel; squabbles followed; and Wesley, apparently by request, went, at the time above stated, to visit them. He writes: “I met the little society, just escaped with the skin of their teeth. From the account which each of these gave, it appeared clear to a demonstration—(1) That their elders usurped a more absolute authority over the conscience, than the Bishop of Rome himself does. (2) That, to gain and secure this, they used a continued train of guile, fraud, and falsehood of every kind. (3) That they scrape their votaries to the bone as to their worldly substance, leaving little to any, to some nothing, or less than nothing. (4) That still they are so infatuated as to believe, that theirs is the only true church upon earth.” But leaving the Moravians, let us track Wesley’s footsteps during the year 1753. The first two months were spent in London. He visited “the Marshalsea prison, a nursery of all manner of wickedness.” “O shame to man,” he writes, “that there should be 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.” He visited many of the sick and poor, and writes: “Who could see such scenes unmoved? There are none such in a pagan country. If any of the Indians in Georgia were sick, those that were near them gave them whatever they wanted. Oh who will convert the English into honest heathen? I found some in their cells underground; others in their garrets, half starved both with cold and hunger; but I found not one of them unemployed, who was able to crawl about the room. So wickedly, devilishly false is that common objection, ‘They are poor, only because they are idle.’ If you saw these things with your own eyes, could you lay out money in ornaments and superfluities?” Just at this juncture, Wesley began to turn his attention to a subject, which afterwards became one of the greatest discoveries of the age.