The inception of a branch of the Church Missionary Society in Bath in late 1817 was not expected to be controversial. By this stage the replication of societies locally was a matter of painting by numbers, a process honed over many years. Events at Bath initially followed the usual pattern. The Bishop of Gloucester, Henry Ryder, the first and at that point the only avowed Evangelical on the episcopal bench, arrived on Sunday, 30 November, and preached on behalf of the society to an enormous congregation at the plush Octagon Chapel. ‘You will rejoice to hear that I came out alive,’ the ageing socialite Hester Lynch Piozzi (1741–1821) told a friend. ‘We were packed like seeds in a sunflower.’ At the Guildhall the following evening, Ryder was in the chair for the inauguration of the auxiliary. No sooner had he delivered his opening speech, however, than the meeting was violently interrupted by Josiah Thomas (1760–1820), the Archdeacon of Bath. Amid pandemonium, Thomas delivered a pre-prepared diatribe against the society, its methods and its personnel. Having registered his protest in the name of himself, the rectors of Bath and ‘nineteen twentieths’ of the local clergy, he stalked out without waiting for a reply. News spread rapidly. The Archdeacon's protest, spattered with multiple exclamation marks and frequent capitalization, went into at least seven editions, and over the next few months at least twenty further pamphlets were produced, stoking controversy in the pages of ecclesiastical journals such as The British Critic and the British Review.

Thomas's speech crystallized what some among the clergy found objectionable about the activities of their Evangelical brethren. It was bad enough, he declared, that the CMS unnecessarily duplicated the function of the existing Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG). But it undermined ecclesiastical order in more drastic respects, not least in placing its operations ‘under the MANAGEMENT (that is the word) of A CORRESPONDING COMMITTEE!!!’ rather than the ordained clergy. This disregard of properly constituted authority was evident at every level of CMS activity.