The gratitude of the decenter cast of respectable people to Mrs More and Wilberforce was great: among the idol shepherds too, until it began slowly to be impossible to doubt that they were connected with the group of ‘Gospel-preaching ministers’, ‘Methodists in the church’, who had been believed for some years to be bent on schism and perhaps worse. For many months this possibility could not be taken seriously even by people who were otherwise well informed about church affairs.

When incredulous and bewildered defenders of the old order could no longer question that the church was being attacked, the morals and manners of the nation deliberately ‘gangrened’, to use the Reverend Robert Fellowes's term for it, they had been provided with a vigorous medium of warning and exhortation. The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine (and Monthly, Literary and Political Censor) made its appearance in July 1798 under the editorship of John Gifford, to defend truth, loyalty, virtue, patriotism and conservatism. It did that chiefly by chastising the errors and follies of radical, liberal, Whig, dissenting and all non-High Church publications and anyone who reviewed them favourably. A resolute Tory of some ability, Gifford made the Anti-Jacobin Review a strong defender of the right from the point of view of government and a formidable foe of its chosen enemies. It fully deserved its ‘very extraordinary encouragement’.