“As your brother has brought so many hymns translated from the French, you will have a sufficient number, and no occasion to increase them by the small addition of Mademoiselle Bourignon’s two little pieces. I desire you to favour my present weakness, if I judge wrong, and not to publish them.
“I do not at all desire to discourage your publication. But when you tell me you write, not for the critic, but for the Christian, it occurs to my mind that you might as well write for both; or in such a manner that the critic may, by your writing, be moved to turn Christian, rather than the Christian turn critic. I should be wanting, I fear, in speaking freely and friendly upon this matter, if I did not give it as my humble opinion that, before you publish, you might lay before some experienced Christian critics the design which you are upon. But I speak this with all submission. It is very likely that, in these matters, I may want a spur more than you want a bridle.”[269]
The book was probably intended for the use of the Moravian bands and other religious societies’ meetings in London, with which Wesley was more or less connected. It contains seventy psalms and hymns; but it is a remarkable fact that not one of them seems to have been written by Wesley’s brother Charles. One each is contributed by Addison, Dryden, and Lord Roscommon. One is from the Church liturgy, and one anonymous. Three are by Bishop Ken; four by Norris; six by Herbert; thirteen by Tate and Brady; thirty-three by Watts; and six are translations by Wesley himself. The book was never reprinted; but it formed the basis of another hymn-book, published three years after, in which exactly one-half of its psalms and hymns were embodied.[270] It was the first[271] of about forty hymnologies published by the two brothers during the next half-century, and which, as priceless gems, were scattered broadcast among the first Methodists.
With Wesley’s first hymn-book we close the first section of his history.