What did Charles Wesley and John Bray do at 13 Little Britain?
Little Britain, EC1 On the morning of May 21st, 1738, Charles Wesley stumbled into John Bray's modest house on this very street, his soul in turmoil and his faith hanging by a thread. What unfolded in those rooms would become the pivotal moment of his life—a profound spiritual awakening that transformed the already-restless clergyman into a man ablaze with evangelical conviction. As Wesley himself would later describe it, the peace that flooded through him was so complete and overwhelming that it marked an irreversible turning point, one that would soon align him fully with his brother John's nascent Methodist movement.
This unremarkable townhouse in Little Britain, now largely forgotten amid the City's modern architecture, was where Charles Wesley's interior revolution took place—the moment a troubled priest became the preacher-poet who would go on to compose thousands of hymns and help reshape English Christianity, all because of a single transformative visit to John Bray's house on this Elizabethan street.
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