This was not the only thing that Wesley and the Methodists did, to contribute to the happiness of the starving poor. It was now that there was organised a band of pious Methodists, who made it their duty and their pleasure to visit the inmates of London workhouses, and, by prayer, and reading, and exhortation, to lead them to Him who is alone the great Comforter. That organisation has uninterruptedly existed down to the present time; and though, for the last twenty years, it has ceased to be a purely Methodist society, its chief workers bear the Methodistic name.[174] From the ninety-fifth annual report of what is now called “The Christian Community,” we learn that this society was “established under the patronage of the Rev. John Wesley, in 1772;” and that its agents, all labouring gratuitously, are regularly visiting the workhouses of Shoreditch, St. Luke’s, Clerkenwell, St. George’s in the East, and Bethnal Green, in eighty-eight halls and wards of which they hold religious services every week; and that, besides this, they have three services weekly in Cambridge Heath female refuge; visit between twenty and thirty low lodging houses, in Spitalfields, every Sunday night; and, during the year, hold about 463 services in the open air, deliver nearly 1400 addresses,[175] and distribute almost a quarter of a million of religious tracts. Not fewer than 124 visitors and exhorters are employed, nearly the whole of whom have appointments every week. Into such a society has been developed the small band of godly Methodists, sent forth by Wesley, in 1772, to visit London paupers and London vagabonds. Its work is little known, and its agents scarcely recognised; but here, in the very heart of London, are 124 home missionaries, toiling to convert the lowest of the low to the faith of Christ, receiving not a farthing for their services, and carrying on their extensive machinery of tract distribution, tent preaching, and a circulating library, at the small expense of about £200 a year. Success to this unpretending and almost unknown society. May the God of heaven prosper it, in its great work, more and more! “It is a shame,” wrote Wesley to Joseph Benson, on December 11, 1772, “It is a shame for any Methodist preacher to confine himself to one place. We are debtors to all the world. We are called to warn every one, to exhort every one, if by any means we may save some. I love prayer-meetings, and wish they were set up in every corner of the town.”[176] Such is a bird’s eye view of the work done, in 1772, by an old man, acutely suffering from the disease already mentioned. Writing to his brother in November, and again in December, Wesley says: “I have just made my tour through Oxfordshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex; but Kent, Sussex, and Hertfordshire still remain to be visited; only the visitation of the London classes, a fortnight’s work, must come between.