The Rev. James Fielding (of Preston, England), Mary's brother, was quite a religious reformer, and of sufficient ministerial reputation and force to become the founder and head of a Congregational Methodist Church. Originally he was a minister of the regular body of that powerful sect, but becoming convinced that modern Methodists had departed from their primitive faith, and that their church no longer enjoyed the Holy Ghost and its gifts, which measurably attended their illustrious founder and his early disciples, the Rev. Mr. Fielding inaugurated a religious reform in the direction intimated. It was an attempt to revive in his ministerial sphere the spiritual power of the Wesleyan movement; nor did he stop at this, but sought to convince his disciples of the necessity of "contending earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints." Other branches of the family also became prominent in the religious reforms of England that arose about the time of the establishing of the Church of Latter-day Saints in America. One of the Fielding sisters married no less a personage than the Rev. Timothy R. Matthews, who figured nearly as conspicuously as the Rev. James Fielding in the early history of the British mission. This Rev. Timothy Matthews was at first minister of the Church of England, and is said to have been a very able and learned man. With the famous Robert Aitken, whom he called his "son," he attempted reformation even in the established Church; or rather, these innovative divines denounced the "apostasy" of that Church, and prosecuted a semi-apostolic mission. It was eminently successful, Robert Aitken and himself raising up large congregations of disciples in Preston, Liverpool, Bedford, Northampton and London. These disciples were popularly called Aitkenites and Matthewites. Quite relevant is all this to the history of the Latter-day Saints in England, for the congregations of the Rev. James Fielding, Rev. Timothy R. Matthews, and Rev. John Richards (father of Jennetta), gave to the apostles their first disciples abroad, and these ministers themselves were their instruments in establishing the British mission. But the name of Fielding, after those of the apostles, was principal in accomplishing these results. The sisters Mary and Mercy, with Joseph, half converted by their letters, the congregation of their reverend brother in Preston, before the advent there of the apostles. In their Brother James' chapel the first apostolic sermon in foreign lands was preached by Heber C. Kimball, and it was one of the Fielding sisters (Mrs. Watson), who gave to the elders the first money for the "gospel's sake" donated to the church abroad.