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This theme is further developed in chapter 3, "The Early Methodist Journalists: George Whitefield and John Wesley." There Hindmarsh correctly asserts, "The early Methodist evangelists not only kept confessional diaries as an aid to devotion, like the Puritans, but they also wrote and published journals in order to stimulate, direct, and defend the growing evangelical movement and to legitimate their own leadership." The net result of the publication of all this autobiographical material—and there was a huge amount of it!—was transformative: "Though conversion might be experienced as an interior or private event, it was now occupying a significant public space." Not only did the published journals of the Wesleys and Whitefield represent a studied, apologetic attempt at defending the evangelical movement, they had the further role of establishing a carefully crafted public identity for the movement and its chief movers. Not only were the journals of Whitefield and Wesley responsible for directing the course of the revival; by describing conversion experiences they also imparted the experience to their readers. The published journals, then, did much to establish a common language of experience and genre among 18th-century evangelicals.
In chapter 4, "White-Hot Piety: The Early Methodist Laypeople," Hindmarsh looks at the lives of common laypeople. Charles Wesley, among others, solicited and collected conversion narratives, and his personal collection of these unpublished conversion stories forms the basis of this chapter. Not only do these stories allow the reader to step behind the carefully crafted public personas of Whitefield and Wesley, they also sugget that the white-hot emotion that the evangelists experienced and preached was readily communicated and replicated by those who heard them preach. The "Christ for me" voice of these laypeople, who found relief for their souls through repentance and faith in Jesus Christ, does not mute the keen sense of community that also extends through these accounts. The writers found their new identity within the context of an experience that was a constitutive feature of their religious community. (A striking feature of these narratives is the persuasiveness of women as witnesses—to other women, but also to men.)
Hindmarsh next walks the reader through the Methodist-Moravian controversy, which resulted in a schism between the two evangelical movements and a division of the Fetter Lane Society. He argues, plausibly, that this schism is best understood as a dispute about the nature of conversion: the Methodists tended towards an "agonistic" travail of the soul in repentance and new birth, while the Moravians stressed a quiet self-yielding and contemplation of the cross of Christ. Both the Methodists and Moravians replicated their traditions by developing conversion narratives that evidenced their theological context and perspective.
Our next stop is at the Cambuslang revival (located five miles southeast of Glasgow, Scotland), which showed that evangelicals—particularly those of a Reformed perspective—had a high degree of biblical literacy and persistently used biblical events and people to describe their own experiences. Not surprisingly the Reformed theology of these narratives distinguished them from their Wesleyan counterparts. In a similar way, John Wesley's published lives of the early Methodist preachers not only reflect Wesleyan-Arminian theology but also the fact that now (by 1779) the conversion narrative had become a full-scale spiritual autobiography. Here the Wesleyan experience of entire sanctification, culminating in a "good" death, was often narrated as a kind of conversion.
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