ABSTRACT

This chapter examines John Wesley’s and Charles Wesley’s communicative method and considers how it was applied to the central evangelical media of the sermon and the hymn. It looks at the strategies which the Wesley brothers employed to authorise and discipline a discourse that was negatively identified with the common and the female voice in its capacity to inflame emotion and the sensual imagination. The association of Methodism with radical enthusiasm would have influenced the communicative practice of the loyalist Wesleys who sought to inspire without inflaming, through a language of forceful but restrained simplicity. Wesley emphasised the importance of precision and clarity in the structure as well as the content and language of the sermon, applying the principles of his formal education in a neatly structured three-point argument which most efficiently served his communicative criteria.