IX. THE METHODIST TUNES
So practical a mind as that of John Wesley, who had from childhood engaged in sacred song, would not be expected to overlook the great importance of the tunes to which the new hymns were to be sung. In 1742 he printed a Collection of Tunes in which only three of the Old Version tunes appeared. Tunes were freely borrowed from the musical Supplement to the New Version, six were secured from German Moravian sources, and a few were new. Tunes were later supplied by Handel and Lampe; popular melodies which the Wesleys picked up in their preaching tours were also adopted.
Some twenty years later fugal tunes became popular among the churches, but became known as “Old Methodist Tunes,” although they had never been officially recognized and had first been written in Scotland.
When we regard the quantity and quality of the Wesleyan hymns, or their adaptation to the spiritual and evangelistic purposes for which they were written, or the body of teaching they conveyed, or the spiritual fervor they created and are still creating in millions of souls, or the influence they exerted on all subsequent hymnody, we do not find the sweeping statement of Dr. James Martineau, the Unitarian divine and hymnbook editor, as exaggerated: “After the Scriptures, the Wesley Hymn Book appears to me the grandest instrument of popular religious culture that Christendom has produced.”