Among the Free Church leaders of Victorian England, two were especially known as exponents of Christian Socialism. They were very dissimilar. John Clifford was a Baptist of provincial working-class origins: he had worked a sixteen-hour day in a lace factory at the age of eleven, and had then become a Chartist. After conversion he took three degrees at London University and entered a ministry which was entirely spent in London. He was overtly political, the author of two Fabian Tracts and the President of the Christian Socialist League in 1894. His passionate resistance to denominational education, and his pacificism, drew him further into party political conflicts, but he never lost the conviction that his ministerial vocation imposed the priority of pastoral over political concerns. He declined an invitation from the North Paddington Liberal Association to be their parliamentary candidate in 1885 precisely because of his spiritual work, yet he wrote at the time, ‘My sense of political duty is strong, my sympathy with the people is intense’. Hugh Price Hughes came from the professional class of South Wales, was a markedly conservative Wesleyan Methodist, and though often absorbed with interest in the public issues of the times was never involved with political organizations. His advocacy of social reform was restrained, though it was in some particulars more far-reaching than it at first appeared. ‘All law and all policy ought to be shaped in the interests of the poor’, he said in 1889, and he meant it.