John Wesley was born at Epworth in 1703. He inherited his mother’s organizing and administrative ability, no less than her deep religious nature. He was to Methodist hymnody what John Calvin was to the Reformed psalmody, its initiator and director. He added a critical power and a practical sense of relation of means to ends his younger brother lacked—Charles Wesley wrote the hymns and John winnowed and edited them. At Oxford he was called the “Father of the Holy Club.” His aggressive spirit drove him to Georgia as a missionary, where he was a misfit, but where he was subjected to needed spiritual discipline, and to the influence of the Moravian pietism and absorption in spiritual things, so valuable for his symmetrical preparation for his future work. It led to his conversion—or, if you prefer, to his baptism of the Holy Spirit—and that of Charles, in 1738, which opened out to them both a new spiritual dimension. It also led to his interest in the Moravian “Gesangbuch,” or hymnbook, from the German of which he translated several hymns for his _Charleston Collection_. On his return to England he took an early opportunity to visit Herrnhut, Saxony, the parent society of the connection. He was delighted with the atmosphere of piety and Christian song which he found there. His pietistic and mystical tendencies were greatly strengthened by his intercourse with Count Zinzendorf and Rothe whom he there met. On his return to London John Wesley kept up his association with the Moravian brethren for some time; but his active temperament could not long be content with their quiet, contemplative attitude, nor could he overcome his dislike for the emphasis they placed on the merely physical aspects of the life and death of Christ which they had brought over from the Roman Catholic mystics. So they presently parted company to the advantage of the aggressive spirit the Wesleys were developing. John Wesley was a scholarly man who had acquired all the culture of seven generations of intellectual family life and of the literary training of a great English university. He had the critical faculty well developed, a nice sense of the value of words, and the ability to marshal them for the expression of his thoughts. His sermons and his theological treatises reveal his logical and analytical mind. His feelings were strong, but not of the effusive character. With this type of mind, it was not strange that as a hymn writer he would succeed better as a translator than as an original hymnist. His important contribution, therefore, consisted of translations from the German of Tersteegen, Gerhardt, Scheffler, Spangenberg, and Zinzendorf, and the amendment or even recasting of hymns by Watts, or of poems by George Herbert. Perhaps his greatest work in hymnody lay in encouraging as well as editing the work of his younger brother, Charles.[2]