England, their ideas were so rapidly accepted as a result of the fervent preaching of lay helpers and the popularity of Charles Wesley’s hymns, that relations with the Church of England reached the breaking point when John Wesley in 1784 ordained a Methodist, against the wishes of the Bishop of London, to preach in America.

John Wesley died in 1795 and four years later came a definite break with the Anglican Church, when the Methodist or Wesleyan Society became a separate church, expanding throughout the world in the eighteenth century to nearly a half a million members.

However, the tightly knit system of the Wesleyan Methodist Church led to autocratic rule by some of the prominent Methodist leaders and soon there were divisions which occurred when the Methodist New Connexion Church broke away in 1797, the Primitive Methodists in 1811, the Bible Christians in 1815, and the United Methodists’ Free Churches in 1857.

2. BENJAMIN CHAPPELL, LEADER OF THE METHODISTS IN THE COLONY OF ISLE de SAINT JEAN

Among the earliest settlers of Isle de Saint Jean were “the people called Methodists” who were not slow upon their arrival in the infant colony, to establish and maintain the public worship of Almighty God under the name of the Wesleyan Methodist Society.

In 1775, when he was thirty-seven years old, Benjamin Chappell and his wife, who had been associated with John Wesley in the Old Foundry Church in London, sailed for Quebec, but a storm wrecked the ship off St. John’s Island and the two hundred and fifty souls, including the crew and passengers, barely escaped with their lives. When they had reached the shore in safety, Chappell conducted a thanksgiving servrce.

After being appointed Postmaster of Prince Edward Island, Chappell did not curtail his unceasing drive to secure Wesleyan missionaries to fill a religious void and 10 provide even the barest of religious services in the primitive setting of this British colony. Throughout his life, he promoted the cause of the Methodists in Prince Edward Island, which he had found in a wild and largely unsettled condition. A native of London, Benjamin Chappell was a convert and a personal friend of John Wesley with whom he corresponded. It was this relationship and his continuing efforts to obtain Wesleyan missionaries for Prince Edward Island that gained Ben- jamin Chappell the credit for founding the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Prince Edward Island.

Coming as he did directly from the scene of the great Wesleyan revival, he naturally brought with him much of the fire and enthusiasm which characterized this remarkable movement in the old land. Mr. Chappell was a man of considerable ability and education, and his life of half a century, principally in Charlottetown,

had an important influence in moulding the character of Methodism in Prince Edward Island.