A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists

John Wesley had been publishing hymn collections for forty years before he made this one, and the 1780 book is the settled version of the project. Its most consequential feature is not any single text but the order. Wesley did not arrange the hymns by the church year, by scripture reference or by metre. He arranged them by the stages of a Christian life as Methodist preaching described it: the state of the natural person, the awakening, the turning, the assurance of forgiveness, the life of the believer, the struggle against remaining sin, and the hope of entire sanctification.

Read straight through, the book is therefore an argument. A convert taken through the sections in order has been taught the whole of Methodist doctrine without opening a work of theology, and Wesley says as much in his preface, describing the collection as a small body of experimental and practical divinity. Experimental in his usage means tested in experience rather than provisional, and the claim is that these hymns state what a believer will actually find to be the case.

The consequence is that Methodism inherited a doctrinal standard in verse. Where other Protestant bodies point to a confession when asked what they hold, Methodists have been able to point to hymns, and disputes about revising Charles Wesley's texts in later hymnals have accordingly been arguments about doctrine rather than about taste. That is unusual. Very few Christian bodies have let their poetry carry that much weight.

Charles Wesley wrote on a scale that is hard to take in, some thousands of hymns across fifty years, and the 1780 collection is a selection from that output rather than a survey of English hymnody. His characteristic method is to build a hymn out of scriptural phrase, so densely that a single stanza may allude to half a dozen passages, and to hold the whole together with a metre that carries a congregation forward rather than letting it dwell.

What that sounded like in the field was contentious at the time. Eighteenth century English parish worship largely meant metrical psalms, sung slowly and led by a clerk. Methodist singing was faster, louder, in parts, and done by everybody present, and critics of the movement said so as a complaint. John Wesley's Directions for Singing, printed in 1761 and still reproduced in Methodist hymnals, tell the singer to learn the tune, to sing all the words, to sing lustily and with a good courage, to take care not to bawl, and above all to keep with the congregation rather than running ahead of it. They read as the instructions of a man who had heard both the enthusiasm and the noise.

The collection travelled with the movement. Methodist missions carried it, the American connexions built their own books from it, and the Black Methodist denominations formed in the United States in the early nineteenth century took the Wesleyan repertory with them and developed it in their own directions. Every hymnal in that family is downstream of 1780.