This well-known extract from the Journal of John Wesley's first visit to the Island in 1777116 not only shows the Manx people in a favourable and often-quoted light but also marks the beginning of the end of the period when the religious life of the Island was ordered by one all-embracing, monolithic church. Even before Wesley's visit Richard Richmond, the Bishop of Sodor and Man, was beset with the presence of ‘several weak persons’ combined in a new Society, ‘contrary to the divine government, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Established Church, and the civil and ecclesiastical laws of this Isle’, in other words Methodists. Having been converted by John Crook, an earlier evangelist in 1775, their numbers were calculated by Rosser, the recorder of Wesleyan Methodism, at some five hundred. In July 1776 the Bishop issued a pastoral letter to his clergy:

Richmond's successors, however, did not view Methodism as a threat to the established church, possibly because of Wesley's insistence that he was in communion with the Church of England; as Rex Kissack has postulated, Manx Methodism was true to Wesley's ideal, an order working within the Anglican Church for its renewal. By the time of Wesley's second visit in May 1781 the conversion of the Island was well under way: in 1805 the Isle of Man became a District of the Methodist Society. It was not long before a variant branch – John Butcher's Primitive Methodism with its revivalism, women preachers and concern for the poor – challenged the first group to be true to the original values of Methodism.