ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the uses of hymnody during the formative years of the Methodist Societies, and its implications for John Wesley's sense of literature's purpose and effect. In answering accusations of enthusiasm and of political iconoclasm, Wesley drew on his abilities as a writer of controversial prose, as an eloquent and forceful public speaker, and as a negotiator in letters and in person. In advice given to the Methodist preachers at the 1755 conference, Wesley appears serious in his genuine recommendation that they avoid anything which would open them to accusations of nonconformity, which he characterises carefully not as displaying enthusiasm but rather obscurity, difficulty and dullness. Charles Wesley's change of tack signals a new formulation of Methodist identity and purpose. The 1780 Collection of Hymns for the People Called Methodists has been taken as the definitive model of Methodist hymnody both by the Methodist Church and by historians of eighteenth-century religion.
