When the Wesleyan Methodist Publishing Association issued this 690 hymn volume from Syracuse, New York, in 1910, the modern Wesleyan Church did not exist yet and would not for another fifty eight years. What existed was the Wesleyan Methodist Church of America, a body that had organized in 1843 when a group of ministers and members withdrew from the Methodist Episcopal Church specifically over its refusal to take a firm stand against slavery, choosing a nonepiscopal structure and a plain, holiness centered style of worship in its place.
That denomination sang from books like this one for decades before anyone involved could have known what would eventually happen to it. On June 26, 1968, the Wesleyan Methodist Church united with the Pilgrim Holiness Church, a separate body with a similar holiness theology and a similar nonepiscopal structure, to form The Wesleyan Church that carries the name today. This hymnal accordingly belongs to only one half of that eventual union, and a specific, older half at that, its hymns carrying the antislavery convictions that had defined the denomination from its very founding six and a half decades earlier.
Both merging bodies had approved a shared Basis for Merger and Constitution two years earlier, in June 1966, and the union itself was not universally welcomed: several conferences in both denominations declined to join the merged church at all, citing disagreements over standards of personal conduct rather than doctrine. A hymnal printed decades before any of that debate began carries none of it, offering a plainer window into what congregational worship actually sounded like in the specific, unmerged denomination that first commissioned it.