The manner in which Wesley by his zeal was pushed outside of the Church
of England limits is told thus by the Rev. W. H. Fitchett:
But these two features of that work--open-air preaching and
the itinerant nature of his ministry--determined many things.
They determined, for example, the general question of Wesley’s
relation to ecclesiastical order. For that order he had been,
and still was, a zealot; but he was slowly learning that
there were things more precious, as well as more urgent, than
mere ecclesiastical use and wont. England was mapped out,
for example, into parishes; and were these faint lines of
ecclesiastical boundaries, drawn by human hands and guarding
fancied human rights, to arrest such a work as Wesley was
beginning? They were like films of cobweb drawn across a track
of an earthquake! And many an ecclesiastical cobweb of the
same kind had to be brushed aside to make room for the new
religious life beginning to stir in Great Britain.--W. H.
FITCHETT, “Wesley and His Century.”
(1822)