Wesley's biographers have generally seen his Georgia ministry as a failure partially redeemed by what he learned from the Moravians. This largely reflects those in the Evangelical tradition judging his career before his May 1738 conversion as a vain attempt to save himself by his own efforts instead of salvation by faith. Such an interpretation was reinforced by Victorians who, in the light of Anglo-Catholicism, viewed Wesley's High-Churchmanship with a mixture of incomprehension and suspicions of ‘popery’. Geordan Hammond avoids these prejudices while drawing on new sources and the magisterial Ward and Heitzenrater edition of Wesley's journal which includes manuscript versions tailored for different audiences. The published journal was a retrospective work of propaganda and apologetic and not the objective contemporary record that it has too often been taken to be. Hammond's is the first book-length study of the Georgia episode, his central argument being that Wesley saw Georgia as a ‘laboratory for implementing his view of primitive Christianity’. Wesley's version of this protean concept derived from Thomas Deacon, a Manchester nonjuror, through his disciple John Clayton, an Oxford associate of Wesley. While the nonjurors had originally left the Church of England over the deposition of James ii, Deacon came from a branch pursuing liturgical experiments based on the fourth-century Apostolic constitutions which they mistakenly believed to contain apostolic teaching. Diverted from his intended Indian mission, Wesley adapted this teaching to his ministry among the colonists. His experiments included strict discipline, baptismal and eucharistic practices, possibly deaconesses, confession and penance. This alienated leading colonists as ‘popery’, culminating in his barring from holy communion of Sophia Williamson, a young woman whom he had contemplated marrying. The conflict deepened when Wesley espoused the cause of poor and oppressed colonists. Examining these issues in their contexts and from contemporary evidence, Hammond judges that Wesley had more success than usually allowed and that practices learnt from his experiments and from the Moravians were used later in Methodism, notably women leaders and hymns. He appears to have experienced less spiritual doubts than he later claimed and he admitted that he had some successes among the colonists. Hammond's case for Georgia as Wesley's laboratory for primitive Christianity is convincingly argued and likely to be a benchmark for future work. His concluding survey of nonjuror influences on Wesley after Georgia may, however, over-emphasise continuities. Wesley certainly continued to speak approvingly of ‘primitive Christianity’ and his Hymns for the Lord's Supper (1748) contain vividly physical language on real presence and sacrifice and the epiklesis (invocation of the Holy Spirit). But against this must be set irregularities culminating in his ordinations. His Sunday service (1784) for the Americans contains scarcely any trace of nonjuror liturgies. He frequently praised the Book of Common Prayer, but this rather drastic revision of the Prayer Book and Articles reflects not only adaptation to American conditions but also disquiet over flaws in both expressed as far back as the 1750s.