The Methodists of the twentieth century were proud of their record of social concern. At the start of the century the Wesleyan Methodist Union for Social Service issued handbooks expounding the responsibility of Christians to engage with social questions. In 1949 their governing Conference issued a ‘Declaration of the Methodist Church on Christian Social and Political Responsibility’. During the second half of the century Lord Soper, a Methodist minister, was the best- known figure in the land expounding Christian socialism. There was a widespread consensus in the denomination that a Christian profession demanded social commitment. Methodists often appealed to their founder in the eighteenth century, John Wesley, as an exemplar of dedication to the cause of the poor. His pronouncements, they argued, ‘make for social reconstruction’. They were confident that their movement had begun with a robust sense of care for the welfare of society at large.

Methodists were less proud of how, as they supposed, ‘the social tendencies of early Methodism’ had been ‘arrested in their development’. It became the general view that after the death of Wesley in 1791 his followers had prospered and become careless of the needs of society, preaching an individualistic message of personal salvation that meshed with the interests of the wealthy. In the middle years of the nineteenth century in particular Wesleyan Methodism had entered its ‘mahogany age’ with grand chapels displaying pulpits constructed out of that expensive wood and preachers who were to be found at ‘the mahogany tables of wealthy laymen’. Only towards the end of the century, it was held, had there been a stirring of social conscience. Hugh Price Hughes, the superintendent of the West London Methodist Mission from 1885 to 1902, had been a pro phetic advocate of engagement with social issues.