so my whole allure with monasticism over the last five or six years has some historic friends from my tribe. talking of samuel wesley, father of john wesley.
The practice of the societies to meet regularly to encourage each other in "practical holiness" was part of a larger design to retreat from the snares of "the world." In this respect there was more than a passing similarity with the purposes of the medieval monastic orders. As Samuel Wesley noted in his "Letter Concerning the Religious Societies,"
I know few good men but lament that after the destruction of monasteries, there were not some societies founded in their stead, but reformed from their errors and reduced to the primitive standard. None who had but looked into our own church history, can be ignorant how highly instrumental such bodies of men as these were to the first planting and propagating Christianity amongst our forefathers... A great part of the good efforts of that way of life may be attained without many of the inconveniences of it, by such societies as we are now discoursing of (M&M, 44)
