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Although in 1738 and 1739 Wesley and his followers frequented the Moravian meeting-house in Neville’s Court, Fetter Lane, the first home of organised Methodism in London was the Foundry in Moorfields.  Lady Huntingdon had identified herself with the Methodists, and thus was enabled to exert great influence upon a movement, small at first, but soon fraught with most potent consequences, the employment by Wesley of lay evangelistic agency.  Wesley had already allowed some of his lay helpers to expound, but not to preach.  Yet here, as in his strong desire to keep the Methodist movement within the borders of the Established Church, he was to find that his personal view, if enforced, would hinder the work which was so manifestly of God, and with his clear common sense he at once gave way.  During 1739 Lady Huntingdon had frequently heard Thomas Maxfield pray, and, according to her biographer, it was at her suggestion that he began to expound the Scriptures.  Wesley had been summoned from London, and no clergyman being available at that moment, he left Maxfield in charge, to pray with the members of the society and to give them such helpful advice as he could.  In a letter to Wesley, written either at the close of 1739 or the beginning of 1740, Lady Huntingdon writes of Maxfield:  “He is one of the greatest instances of God’s peculiar favour that I know:  he is raised from the stones to sit amongst the princes of His people.  The first time I made him expound, expecting little from him, I sat over against him and thought what a power of God must be with him to make me give any attention to him.  But before he had gone over one-fifth part, any one that had seen me would have thought I had been made of wood or stone; so quite immovable I both felt and looked.  His power in prayer is quite extraordinary.”

The border line between such expounding and preaching is very narrow, and it is hardly to be wondered at that Maxfield soon found that he was not only preaching, but doing so with the most true and certain warrant of fitness for the office—­souls were being born again under his ministrations.  On hearing such unexpected tidings, Wesley hurried back to London, and entering his house next door to the Foundry with clouded face, replied to his mother’s question as to the cause, “Thomas Maxfield has turned preacher, I find.”  Great was his surprise to receive the rejoinder, “Take care what you do with respect to that young man, for he is as surely called of God to preach as you are.”  Such testimony from such a source could not fail to move John Wesley.  He wisely heard for himself, and expressed his judgment in the words of Scripture—­“It is the Lord:  let Him do what seemeth Him good.”

Thus Methodism passed through what might have been its first great crisis.  Thus it equipped itself to keep pace with the ever-increasing claims of its work.  The quick spiritual insight of Lady Huntingdon recognised both the need and the fitness of the hitherto unrecognised worker.