. John Wesley and his brother Charles Wesley were the founders of Methodism in England in 1729; the Manchester and Salford Wesleyan mission was named after them, as were many other missions (and missionaries). There were “numerous and flourishing voluntary societies to combat vice, and religious societies to enlighten the faithful”; the society set up by the Wesley brothers in Oxford in 1729 was “to prove that the decline of the religious spirit had been exaggerated”