For centuries the Established Church had preached to the poor the duties of obedience. But it was so distanced from them – and its distance was rarely greater than in this time of absenteeism and plural livings – that its homilies had ceased to have much effect.

a movement which succeeded, very largely, in extirpating this insidious ‘violation’ of the Lord’s Day

[...] The commonplace doctrine of employers in the 18th century was the simple one that only the lowest possible wages could enforce the poor to work: as Arthur Young declared, in 1771, "every one but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious". Methodism in no way challenged this doctrine; indeed, it reinforced it with the conventional teaching of the blessedness of poverty. what it did was to provide an inner compulsion as well.

‘It required, in fact, a man of a Napoleonic nerve and ambition, to subdue the refractory tempers of work-people accustomed to irregular paroxysms of diligence…. Such was Arkwright.’ Moreover, the more skilled a workman, the more intractable to discipline he became, ‘the more self-willed and… the less fit a component of a mechanical system, in which, by occasional irregularities, he may do great damage to the whole’. Thus the manufacturers aimed at withdrawing any process which required ‘peculiar dexterity and steadiness of hand… from the cunning workman’ and placing it in charge of a ‘mechanism, so self-regulating, that a child may superintend it’. ‘The grand object therefore of the modern manufacturer is, through the union of capital and science, to reduce the task of his work-people to the exercise of vigilance and dexterity, – faculties… speedily brought to perfection in the young.’

‘in training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton’

For the children, the discipline of the overlooker and of the machinery might suffice; but for those ‘past the age of puberty’ inner compulsions were required. Hence it followed that Ure devoted a section of his book to the ‘Moral Economy of the Factory System’, and a special chapter to religion. The unredeemed operative was a terrible creature in Ure’s sight; a prey to ‘artful demagogues’; chronically given to secret cabals and combinations; capable of any atrocity against his masters. The high wages of cotton-spinners enabled them ‘to pamper themselves into nervous ailments by a diet too rich and exciting for their indoor occupations’:

It is evident that there was, in 1800, casuistry enough in the theology of all the available English churches to reinforce the manufacturer’s own sense of moral self-esteem.

Works were the snares of pride and the best works were mingled with the dross of sin;

Again and again the penitent in his ‘novitiate’ succumbs to obscurely-indicated ‘temptations’:

The Methodists made of religion (wrote Southey) ‘a thing of sensation and passion, craving perpetually for sympathy and stimulants’.1 These Sabbath orgasms of feeling made more possible the single-minded weekday direction of these energies to the consummation of productive labour. Moreover, since salvation was never assured, and temptations lurked on every side, there was a constant inner goading to ‘sober and industrious’ behaviour – the visible sign of grace – every hour of the day and every day of the year. Not only ‘the sack’ but also the flames of hell might be the consequence of indiscipline at work. God was the most vigilant overlooker of all. Even above the chimney breast ‘Thou God Seest Me’ was hung. The Methodist was taught not only to ‘bear his Cross’ of poverty and humiliation; the crucifixion was (as Ure saw) the very pattern of his obedience: ‘True followers of our bleeding Lamb, Now on Thy daily cross we die…’2 Work was the Cross from which the ‘transformed’ industrial worker hung.

From both it took over the almost-Manichaean sense of guilt at man’s depravity.

There is a sense in which any religion which places great emphasis on the after-life is the Chiliasm of the defeated and the hopeless.