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Religious lives and letters in a variety of formats were edited and disseminated for the purposes of example, encouragement, instruction, and pleasure. This chapter analyses a wide range of examples, such as collections of lives made by puritans, dissenters, Quakers, and Methodists, including the lives of women; posthumous collections of letters by clergy and ministers; letters published in magazines; diaries and journals, some published by the writers themselves, notably George Whitefield and John Wesley; and exemplary lives of individual ministers and laypeople. There are detailed case studies of John Newton’s life of William Grimshaw and Wesley’s life of John William Fletcher, and of the much republished lives of the Presbyterian Colonel James Gardiner, the Congregationalist Joseph Williams, and the Methodist Hester Anne Rogers.

This chapter presents excerpts from John William Fletcher's First Check to Antinomianism: Or, A Vindication of the Rev. Mr. Wesley's Last Minutes…in Five Letters (1771). When Methodism, which began as a movement of renewal within the Church England in the late 1730s, split into two factions, Fletcher joined the second generation of Methodists. Three years after his ordination as a minister in the Church of England, Fletcher became vicar of Madeley in Shropshire in 1760, and remained so for the remainder of his life. When the Methodist preacher Walter Shirley expressed his concern regarding some of the comments made in the Methodist minutes at the 1770 conference, Fletcher corrected what he believed were misinterpretations about Charles Wesley's doctrines. Originally a series of private letters written to Shirley, Fletcher's First Check to Antinomianism was published as a polemic that contains his interpretation of Wesleyan theology.

This chapter presents excerpts from Mary Fletcher's Jesus, Altogether Lovely: Or a Letter to Some of the Single Women in the Methodist Society (1766). Fletcher was one of the most influential Methodist women of the eighteenth century. Mary wed John William Fletcher, vicar of Madeley, on November 12, 1781, and together they sustained a dynamic ministry in Madeley witnessing to the colliers and lower ranks in the parish. When John died of a fever in August 1785, Mary continued her ministry at Madeley. In her letter, Mary offered advice to single women on the subjects of chastity, poverty, and obedience.