Wesleyanism in the 1740s made contact with the primary religious imagination through the constant assertion that supernatural power was available to the individual believer. Most forms of Christianity talk in this way at times, but it is rarer for this liturgical, evocative language to become the expression of a driving communal conviction. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, after some 200 years of religious troubles, the idea that supernatural power was locally obtainable tended to be carefully controlled. The Wesleys themselves downplayed the notion that the individual's saving faith should include an intense belief in the imminence of a divine Second Coming which would transform visible existence. They preferred to refer to the second advent as an event which would certainly occur, but which was not to be expected in the immediate future; what was available was a more limited, faith-dependent eruption of divine power into the individual or small-group consciousness. The world was not about to change – though for much of the first half of the eighteenth century the Wesleys hoped the Church of England might – but this did not mean that individuals could not find themselves changed, and for a time at least the Wesleys believed they could be changed absolutely. Perfectionism – which in practice was more a state of consciousness, a sense of existing at peace with God without consciously breaking the moral law, than a pattern of behaviour; and which seems effectively to have kept some people in acute anxiety because no one could remain indefinitely in an ecstatic state of consciousness – had few social consequences outside the societies themselves.