So wrote John Wesley (1703–91), in what scholars call his conversion narrative, concerning an experience that reportedly took place during a meeting (somewhat like a modern day Bible study) in London on the evening of Wednesday, May 24, 1738. At that time, Wesley, the son of a clergyman, was himself a Church of England minister who had recently returned from a (not altogether successful) three-year assignment as a missionary in Savannah, Georgia (at that time a British colonial possession). Reporting that he had “continual sorrow and heaviness of heart” on the days preceding that evening meeting in late May, Wesley recounts in this famous journal entry how—as that evening's speaker was addressing Martin Luther's commentary on Paul's letter (or, from the Greek, epistle) to the early Christians who were in Rome—he had experienced a “strange warming” of his heart—a phrase that has become famous, especially among historians of Methodism, the originally British but now worldwide Protestant denomination that John and his younger brother Charles (1707–88) went on to establish.