On the 15th of April, Wesley paid his first visit to the town of Liverpool, where he spent the next five days. “It is,” says he, “one of the neatest, best built towns I have seen in England: I think it is full twice as large as Chester; most of the streets are quite straight. Two thirds of the town, we were informed, have been added within these forty years. If it continue to increase, in the same proportion, in forty years more, it will nearly equal Bristol. The people in general are the most mild and courteous I ever saw in a seaport town; as, indeed, appears by their friendly behaviour, not only to the Jews and papists who live among them, but even to the Methodists. The preaching house is a little larger than that at Newcastle.” He adds: “every morning, as well as evening, abundance of people gladly attended the preaching. Many of them, I learned, were dear lovers of controversy; but I had better work—I pressed upon them all ‘repentance toward God, and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.’” Wesley’s description of a town, now, in point of size, the second city in the kingdom, is not without interest. We have before us a map of Liverpool, published in 1754, which represents the town as merely skirting the Mersey; while Everton and other places, now engulfed in the vast Liverpool population, are represented as somewhat distant villages, surrounded with fields and woods. At that period, there were only three churches—St. Nicholas’s, St. Peter’s, and St. George’s; and two of these had been built within the last half century. The first Methodist preaching place in Liverpool was a small, dingy, and inconvenient room in Cable Street. A society being formed, a piece of ground was purchased for the erection of a chapel,—the same as the site of the present Pitt Street chapel, and here was built the meeting-house, which Wesley describes as being a little larger than the Orphan House at Newcastle. The neighbourhood was unoccupied and dirty. At the front of the chapel was a large pool of water, through which the Methodists had to pass by the help of stepping stones.[221] Nearly forty years after the time of Wesley’s first visit, the chapel was flanked by a large brickfield; and Adam Clarke, who was then the resident preacher, describes his house as being “neither in hell nor purgatory, yet in a place of torment.” “But where is it?” asked his friend. “You must go,” answered the warm-hearted Hibernian, “down Dale Street, then along East Street, and when you are up to the middle in clay and mud, call out lustily for Adam Clarke.”[222]