The Hymn-Book of the Modern Church: Brief studies of hymns and hymn-writers

by Arthur E. Gregory

II.—Hymns of the Methodist Revival

The first Wesleyan hymn-book is earlier than the Evangelical Revival. When John Wesley sailed for Georgia, he took with him Herbert’s Poems, Watts’s Psalms and Hymns, and John Austin’s Offices. From these and some other books he prepared ‘the first hymn-book compiled for use in the Church of England.’[108] It was published at Charlestown in 1737, and is entitled, A Collection of Psalms and Hymns. The book is a ‘Christian week’ rather than a Christian year, being divided into three sections—for Sunday; for Wednesday and Friday; for Saturday. It is in many respects a most interesting volume. There is little trace of ‘catholic’ doctrine, unless it be in the verses taken from Austin’s Office of the Saints, and there is less of sacramental teaching than in the present Methodist Hymn-book.

Of the seventy hymns half are by Dr. Watts, and amongst these are his version of Ps. c, with Wesley’s famous first lines—

Before Jehovah’s awful throne,

Ye nations, bow with sacred joy;

and the cxlvi., which Wesley repeated with his dying breath. Seven hymns are by John Austin; six are moderately successful attempts to make some of Herbert’s matchless poems available for use in public worship. The Wesleyan portion of the book consists of five hymns by Samuel Wesley, senior; five by Samuel Wesley, junior; and five translations from the German by John Wesley himself. Charles Wesley’s hymns are conspicuous by their absence. Probably the explanation is that, as he had already sailed for England, his MSS. were not at his brother’s disposal.

In 1738, on his return to England, John Wesley published another small hymn-book, with the same title and a similar arrangement, though the contents are different. This is, I think, the only one of his many hymn-books in which Ken’s hymns are included. In 1739 the brothers issued their first joint publication, ‘Hymns and Sacred Poems, published by John Wesley, M.A., Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and Charles Wesley, M.A., Student of Christ Church, Oxford. London. Printed by William Strahan, and sold by James Hutton, bookseller, at the Bible and Sun without Temple Bar; Mr. Bray’s, a brazier, in Little Britain, M DCC XXXIX.’ In this volume Charles Wesley’s first published poems appeared, and from this time he is the recognized poet of the Revival.

Charles Wesley was born at Epworth Rectory on December 18, 1707. Notwithstanding poverty, debt, difficulty, and persecution, there was probably no more truly Christian home in England. The cultivation of personal religion and simple faith in God found congenial soil here, and doubtless in other obscure country parsonages. The Rector of Epworth was a poet of some gifts, which the whole family inherited in greater or less degree. His eldest son—sixteen years older than Charles—was a minor poet and hymn-writer, and the younger members of the family grew up in an atmosphere which must have made it natural for them to write verses.

We have, however, no indication of precocious hymn-writing on the part of Charles Wesley, nor, indeed, of any poetic composition till he was seven-and-twenty, when he writes to convey a protest against his sister’s marriage. Probably he did not discover his special talent till he was in Georgia, where the Governor’s wife wrote, ‘Mr. Wesley has the gift of verse, and has written many sweet hymns, which we sing.’[109]

But if Charles Wesley wrote little poetry before his American mission, he had received much of the training which was in due season to yield such abundant fruit. The gracious influences of the Lincolnshire rectory, of the Oxford Methodists, of his Moravian fellow passengers, all helped to mould his fervent spirit. The poet within him could not long be silent, and had already awoke when he received the baptism of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, 1738. This was the time of his evangelical conversion, when he passed out of the state of the anxious and conscientious servant into the glorious liberty of the child of God. From that time the word of Christ dwelt in him richly. ‘The wealth of God’[110] was bestowed upon him, and out of the abundance of a heart enriched by the indwelling word he poured forth psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs in an almost ceaseless stream. Had Charles Wesley never passed through this experience he would have been one of our greatest ecclesiastical hymn-writers, and would have ranked with Heber and Keble, but there would have been no distinctively Methodist hymnody, and the Evangelical Revival would have been immeasurably poorer. Moreover, he did very much to preserve the standard of good taste, as well as the fervour of religious feeling, in primitive Methodism.

Charles Wesley, a Christ Church student, came to add sweetness to this sudden and startling light. He was the ‘sweet singer’ of the movement. His hymns expressed the fiery conviction of its converts in lines so chaste and beautiful, that its more extravagant features disappeared. The wild throes of hysteric enthusiasm passed into a passion for hymn-singing, and a new musical impulse was aroused in the people which gradually changed the face of public devotion throughout England.[111]

Charles Wesley would probably have accepted Keble’s judgement as to the value of ‘a sober standard of feeling in matters of practical religion,’ but his standard allowed a much wider range and warmer glow to feeling than was possible to the poet of the later Oxford Movement. Both the Wesleys shrank with the instinct of the scholar and the gentleman from extravagance and vulgarity. Their energies were often devoted to restraining the exuberant manifestations of the fervour of their converts; and though they dared not deal too strictly with what they believed to be indications of genuine spiritual emotion, they deprecated undue excitement, and regarded hysterical testimonies in a very different light from that in which Edward Irving viewed the speaking with tongues.

Saved from the fear of hell and death,

With joy we seek the things above;

And all Thy saints the spirit breathe

Of power, sobriety, and love.

Pure love to God Thy members find,

Pure love to every soul of man;

And in Thy sober, spotless mind,

Saviour, our heaven on earth we gain.[112]

If Charles Wesley impressed himself upon the Methodist Revival to its great benefit, the Revival in its turn most advantageously affected his hymn-writing. In many of his poems it is easy to trace the influence of the Anglican Prayer-book or the Moravian prayer-meeting, but the typically Methodist hymns show little trace of either; they are songs of the open-air service or of the class-room. Beecher’s statement that Charles Wesley’s ‘hymns are only Moravian hymns re-sung’ is more than a gross exaggeration.

In the early days of Methodism, Charles Wesley was as energetic and as successful an evangelist as John. He loved the stir, the tumult, the triumph of those great outdoor gatherings, where testimony must be borne before mobs who might at any time endanger the property and even the lives of preacher and hearers. In this regard the poet of the Evangelical Revival had a great advantage over the poet of the Tractarian Movement. Keble is one of the singers of the country parsonage. At Fairford and Hursley he found, as Cowper at Olney,

The calm retreat, the silent shade,

With prayer and praise agree;

but Charles Wesley was moved to his highest flights of praise by hard-won victories amongst his wild hearers in Cornwall, or Moorfields, at Kingswood, or Walsall. The depths of his soul were moved when he saw the first signs of penitence in the unwonted tears which cut white channels in the begrimed faces of the colliers, whom he taught to sing

But O the power of grace Divine!

In hymns we now our voices raise,

Loudly in strange hosannas join,

And blasphemies are turned to praise!

Nor must we overlook the influence of the Methodist class-meeting upon Charles Wesley’s hymns. That institution was of the essence of Methodism. It provided a ‘Holy Club,’ or a number of holy clubs, in every place where converts had been gathered. True to his mission as the poet of Methodism, he provided hymns for the Societies in their private meetings as well as in their vast evangelistic gatherings. The hymn-book naturally begins with the section headed ‘Exhorting and Beseeching to Return to God,’ but the majority of the hymns are for the penitent, the mourner, the believer, and for the backslider—the man in whom old habits have proved too strong, who has wandered back to sin, but longs to turn to God again. Charles Wesley shared with John the pastoral oversight of the converts, often spending many weeks in Dublin, Newcastle, or Bristol, or passing rapidly through Cornwall or the Black Country, not only preaching the gospel, but carefully examining, encouraging, and sifting the societies. The class-meeting gave the distinctive tone to Methodist devotion, and Charles Wesley was quick to sympathize with the varying moods of religious experience related by the members. His hymns were often written for use by the Society in its stated gatherings or by Christian friends meeting socially in each other’s houses. In every revision of the Methodist Hymn-book it has been recognized that ample provision must be made for such occasions, and that hymns might be very useful and, in fact, extensively used though never heard in public worship.

The Wesleys were singularly open to impressions from those whom they met, or whose books they read. Anglican, Moravian, Mystic by turns, they only gradually developed into Methodists. In their first joint publication they note that ‘some verses ... were wrote upon the scheme of the Mystic divines’ whom they ‘had once in great veneration, as the best explainers of the gospel of Christ.’[113] George Herbert, John Norris (that other less famous parson of Bemerton), Henry More, and such German hymn-writers as Freylinghausen, Christian Friedrich Richter, and W. C. Dessler, were their first masters of Christian song; but Charles Wesley soon found his own wings, and ceased to belong to any school of poets, though to the end traces of other men’s writings are to be found—amounting occasionally to actual verbal quotation, e.g. from Milton, Young, Tate and Brady.

It is not possible to assign dates for the composition of many of Charles Wesley’s hymns after the early years of the Revival, except those called forth by some special occasion, such as the ‘Earthquake Hymns,’ and those for the troubled days of the Insurrection of 1745. At such times the hymns must have been written as a kind of task-work, and the result is rarely more than commonplace. The poet seemed to think it his duty, as the laureate of Methodism, to provide suitable hymns for the special services rendered necessary by stirring events, and usually wrote one or two in each of the favourite metres. These were issued in small pamphlets at a few pence, and no doubt sold very extensively, as did John Wesley’s prose tracts, through which he ‘unawares became rich.’

It is difficult for a Methodist preacher of the fourth generation, whose earliest and most sacred associations are hallowed by memories of Wesley’s hymns, to attempt an impartial, not to say a critical, survey of them. If, then, I seem to place too high an estimate on the Wesley poetry as compared with the hymns of others, I trust it may be credited rather to early training and inherited affection than to denominational partiality.

It may at once be granted that Charles Wesley wrote far too easily and too diffusely to secure permanent remembrance for the majority of his hymns. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, might disappear without serious loss to the spiritual and devotional life of the Church. It may be admitted, further, that he did not know which were his best and which his worst productions, and that John Wesley’s editing might with advantage have been more severe. The printing-press was dangerously convenient to Charles Wesley, and the certainty of extensive sale for everything he published, combined with the enthusiasm with which their people received what the brothers wrote, either in prose or verse, presented a temptation to rapid and frequent publication which few poets could resist. Moreover, much that he wrote was designed for immediate use, and had to be written, printed, published ere the occasion passed. Yet it is probable that not much would have been gained by elaborate revision. Charles Wesley was too tender-hearted to treat his literary offspring as David treated the Moabites, measuring two lines to put to death and one full line to keep alive, though both he and Dr. Watts might not unwisely have adopted some such heroic measure.

His hymns were often written at white heat, but they underwent constant revision by their author, and generally they had a further revision by his brother. The poet himself records eight revisions of his Short Hymns on the Gospels and Acts, which he noted were ‘finished April 24, 1765,’ and revised for the last time May 11, 1787.

In his Journal, John Wesley records, under date December 15, 1788—

This week I dedicated to the reading over my brother’s works. They are short poems on the Psalms, the four Gospels, and the Acts of the Apostles. Some are bad; some mean; some most excellently good; they give the true sense of Scripture, always in good English, generally in good verse; many of them are equal to most, if not to any, he ever wrote; but some still savour of that poisonous mysticism with which we were both not a little tainted before we went to America.

‘Some bad, some mean, some most excellently good.’ The judgement is just, though we who are accustomed to our richer and more varied hymn-books should probably place not a few in a fourth class—certainly not ‘bad’ or ‘mean,’ yet hardly ‘excellently good.’

In the Methodist Hymn-book 429 hymns are attributed to Charles Wesley; in the hymnals of other Churches there are to be found a number which are unknown in Methodism. It is safe to say that of Charles Wesley’s hymns about 500 are living still.

The first great service Wesley’s hymns rendered to Christian song was to raise the standard of feeling in matters of practical religion. John Wesley’s emendation of a line of Doddridge’s may illustrate the influence of Methodist hymns upon religious emotion. Doddridge wrote—

Ye humble souls, that seek the Lord,

Chase all your fears away;

And bow with pleasure down to see

The place where Jesus lay.

Wesley changed ‘pleasure’ into ‘rapture’ in the hymn, and Methodism raised Christian emotion from the quiet satisfaction of Watts, Doddridge, and the elect souls who kept alive the faith during the drab years which preceded the Revival, to the ecstatic gladness of those to whom that great movement brought the brightness of a morning without clouds. The largest section of the hymn-book was headed ‘For Believers Rejoicing.’ No other Christian poet ever sang such songs, for no other has ever known the joy of the evangelist as Charles Wesley knew it.

In a rapture of joy

My life I employ,

The God of my life to proclaim;

’Tis worth living for this,

To administer bliss

And salvation in Jesus’s name.

Joyousness was the natural result of the gospel he preached. It was the good news of the assurance of personal salvation. Here John Wesley’s emendation of one of Watts’s famous hymns may serve as an illustration. Watts wrote—

My soul looks back to see

The burdens Thou didst bear

When hanging on the cursèd tree,

And hopes her guilt was there.

Wesley shows the difference between Methodism and Calvinism by the change of a word—

And knows her guilt was there.

The Methodist doctrine of Assurance, the revival or rediscovery of the doctrine of the Witness of the Spirit, gave to Christian experience a confidence which was more joyous than that of the ‘elect.’ The Wesleys never slurred the need of repentance—deep, poignant, practical; but there is a great gulf between the comparatively brief pangs of the Methodist penitent and the habitual depression of the devout Romanist ever searching through the dark places of the heart to find matter for confession. The shades of the prison-house did not linger long around the emancipated soul. Coming out of the gloom into the sunshine the road wound

Uphill all the way,

Yes, to the very end.

The redeemed of the Lord returned to Zion with singing, with everlasting joy upon their heads. Notwithstanding all that may be said, and, to some extent, with justice, of the terrors, even the horrors, of early evangelical preaching concerning death, hell, and judgement, the Methodist hymns brought into Christian worship a brighter and more trustful tone than it had known for many generations. The Revival brought back the golden days, the joy of heart, which characterized the Apostolic Church, and the German Protestants at the Reformation. At the time of the Revival the Church of England, though largely Arminian in doctrine, was so incapable of fervour, so afraid of zeal, that it had practically no power over the masses, whilst by the classes Christianity was, as Bishop Butler said, regarded ‘not so much as a subject of inquiry,’ but ‘now at length discovered to be fictitious.’

In the Establishment there was hardly spiritual life enough to put real vigour even into religious controversy. Butler’s Analogy is typical of the position of the ecclesiastical leaders of that day. They were content if they could demonstrate that the balance of probabilities was in favour of Christianity, and did not even desire to be anointed with the oil of gladness above their fellows.

The most earnest and aggressive of the Nonconformists were stanchly Calvinistic, and, by their most cherished beliefs, were precluded from the magnificent visions of a redeemed world, which were at once the inspiration and the attraction of Methodist preaching.

Altogether outside theological controversy, and, for the most part, uncared for by the religious people of the day, lay the masses, ignorant, degraded, despised, who neither gave, nor were expected to give, heed to things higher than the needs of the ‘mere animal.’ Of them Charles Wesley only too truly said—

Wild as the untaught Indian’s brood

The Christian savages remain.

The hymns ‘Exhorting and Beseeching to Return to God’ at once attracted the

Poor outcasts of men, whose souls were despised

And left with disdain.

Very surely, though very slowly, the glad evangel of the hymns which offer pardon and holiness and heaven to all won its way in the Churches. It is one of the most precious fruits of the Revival that now hardly any Church can forbear to sing them. Nor is it too much to say that Methodist hymns, even more than Methodist teaching, broke down the Calvinistic idea of the Church—

We are a garden walled around,

Chosen and made peculiar ground;

A little spot enclosed by grace

Out of the world’s wide wilderness.

Again, John Wesley’s hymns gave a great impulse, and added a great sanction, to the expression of personal experience in hymns. They were unfettered by what has been well described as the ‘old traditions of reserved and reticent worship.’[114] For good or ill, there is little of reserve or reticence in Charles Wesley’s hymns.

What we have felt and seen

With confidence we tell.

Many poets of the sanctuary have felt that the most sacred experiences of the penitent sinner and of the sanctified believer were not to be put into words, that to utter them was to expose to the coarse breath of the world what must perish in the very act of expression. It was not without an effort that Charles Wesley broke through this ‘reserve;’ yet he did, and that not only from a sense of duty, but from a conviction that to be silent would be a cowardly yielding to the temptation to shun the reproach of Christ.

And shall I slight my Father’s love?

Or basely fear His gifts to own?

Unmindful of His favours prove?

Shall I, the hallowed cross to shun,

Refuse His righteousness to impart,

By hiding it within my heart?[115]

Moreover, many of Charles Wesley’s hymns—especially the more personal—were intended to be sung ‘secretly among the faithful,’ rather than in the congregation. They were written for the family gatherings of ‘the household of the faith,’ and thus were free from the restraints which might be necessary in compositions intended for larger and less sympathetic assemblies.

Wesley’s hymns represented and, to a considerable extent, created the specific Methodist type of religious thought, emotion, and expression. They were, also, the vehicle by which doctrine was conveyed to the minds of the uneducated masses. The great truths which it was the mission of Methodism to teach are conspicuous in the Methodist hymns. Justification by Faith, the Witness of the Spirit, Universal Redemption, Entire Sanctification, are all taught in Charles Wesley’s remembered hymns as they are in John Wesley’s forgotten tracts. If the hymns have ceased to be peculiarly Methodist, it is because Christian experience and teaching have been so largely influenced by them.

It is impossible not to compare Charles Wesley with his great predecessor, Isaac Watts. The day has gone by in which rival camps or choirs seek to exalt the one by disparaging the other. As we have seen, Watts’s Psalms and Hymns were taken by the Wesleys on their mission to Georgia, and it can never be forgotten that, with his dying breath, John Wesley quoted the hymn which, from those early days, had been included in the hymn-books prepared by him for congregational use.

Watts was less careful of the technique of his poetry than Charles Wesley. His rhymes are often very bad, and occasionally are altogether forgotten, and this is true of hymns whose intrinsic value is such that they retain, and are likely to retain, their place in our hymn-books. Charles Wesley is not without sin in this regard, but a really bad rhyme is comparatively rare in his best compositions. He has less of poetic imagery than Watts, and has not so keen an eye for the beauties of the natural world. Charles Wesley never wrote a hymn that, in its own way, compares with

Eternal Wisdom! Thee we praise;

nor do I know any verse of his which equals in its rich, strong monosyllables, Watts’s

His every[116] word of grace is strong

As that which built the skies;

The voice that rolls the stars along

Speaks all the promises.

Wesley was apt to use long and awkward words, sometimes of his own coining, rarely adding to the force, and always detracting from the practical value of the hymn.

It must also be admitted that Charles Wesley wrote some verses the taste of which is dreadful, though he never approaches the execrable coarseness of some Moravian hymns, or of the lines which Walter Shirley transfigured into ‘Sweet the moments rich in blessing.’ Both Watts and Wesley had a quiet rather than a keen sense of humour, but they had little of that appreciation of the comic which is so acute in our own time.[117]

Charles Wesley rarely, if ever, reaches the depth of prosaic commonplace which marks many of Watts’s hymns. He had a more sensitive ear and a more cultivated taste, and, what is perhaps more to the point, he had a faithful, though affectionate and admiring, critic in his brother. When John Wesley said of Charles that his least praise was his talent for poetry, he meant, not to disparage his hymns, but to bear the highest testimony possible to the gifts and graces of his mind and character.

In considering somewhat in detail the hymns of Charles Wesley, it is convenient to treat of them in the classes into which they may be broadly divided. But even so it is obviously impossible to glance at more than a small number of his poems.

1.—Hymns of the Christian Year

The idea of an elaborate classification according to the Church seasons, so usual in modern Anglican hymnals, had not yet become popular. Bishop Ken’s Hymns for all the Festivals of the Year[118] (published in 1721, ten years after his death), the precursor and, to some extent, the inspiration of the Christian Year, was not intended for use as a hymn-book. Wither’s Hymns and Songs of the Church (1623) provided for all the chief festivals, saints’ days, and other occasional services. About forty years later (1661) Dr. Eaton, Vicar of Bishop’s Castle, Salop, published The Holy Calendar, but his poems were not intended to be sung. The Wesleys issued a number of pamphlets containing hymns for the great festivals, and it would not be difficult to select from their various publications a ‘Christian year,’ in which every hymn was suitable for public worship. But the pieces would need to be gathered, for the brothers did not contemplate the use of their hymn-books in Church services; they were designed for the preaching-house, the open-air service, and the class-meeting. The Nonconformist Churches had adopted the custom early in the century, but in the Church of England hymn-singing was still, and for many years after, an irregularity, if not an offence.

First and greatest of Charles Wesley’s festival hymns is the Christmas carol

Hark! how all the welkin rings,

‘Glory to the King of kings.’

It was published in 1739, and is not impossibly one of the ‘many sweet hymns’ which were sung in the household of General Oglethorpe. Whitefield made some popular alterations, and included it in his Collection, in 1753. In 1782 it found a place in the Prayer-book, after the new version of the Psalms. It was omitted from Wesley’s Collection, but was inserted in the supplement of 1830—nearly a century after its composition.

In the same metre, and not inferior, are the hymns for Easter—

‘Christ, the Lord, is risen to-day,’

Sons of men and angels say!

and for Ascension Day—

Hail the day that sees Him rise,

Ravished from our wishful eyes.

There are some good verses in the Whit Sunday hymn—

Granted is the Saviour’s prayer,

Sent the gracious Comforter;

and in the little-known hymn for the Epiphany—

Sons of men, behold from far,

Hail the long-expected Star![119]

but they are not equal to the others.

Of Charles Wesley’s hymns on our Lord’s Passion, the finest are those beginning

With glorious clouds encompassed round,

Whom angels dimly see,

Will the Unsearchable be found,

Or God appear to me?

. . . . .

O Love divine! what hast thou done!

The immortal God hath died for me

The Father’s co-eternal Son

Bore all my sins upon the tree;

The immortal God for me hath died!

My Lord, my Love is crucified.

. . . . .

O Thou who hast our sorrows borne,

Help us to look on Thee and mourn,

On Thee Whom we have slain,

Have pierced a thousand thousand times,

And by reiterated crimes

Renewed Thy mortal pain.[120]

The popular hymn beginning

All ye that pass by,

To Jesus draw nigh:

To you is it nothing that Jesus should die?

is, owing to its cheerful metre, hardly suited to the solemn services of Good Friday, and was intended for the open air. It was headed ‘Invitation to Sinners,’ and was used by Whitefield with great effect when preaching at the Market Cross, Nottingham, and elsewhere.

John Wesley appointed many fast days, and was careful to fix them on Friday, but the observance of Lent does not seem to have been enforced, or even strongly recommended, in the Methodist Society. Hymns for saints’ days and for the minor festivals are unknown to the Wesley poetry.

2. Hymns on the Lord’s Supper.[121]

This pamphlet contains 166 hymns, many of which are admirable and very close paraphrases of passages in Brevint’s Christian Sacrifice, but others are independent of that devout treatise. Many lend themselves readily to use in ‘catholic’ services, and have often been quoted as indicating high sacramentarian views.[122]

On the other hand, such verses as the following must be taken in an entirely evangelical sense—

The cup of blessing, blessed by Thee,

Let it Thy blood impart:

The bread Thy mystic body be,

And cheer each languid heart.

. . . . .

With solemn faith we offer up,

And spread before Thy glorious eyes,

That only ground of all our hope,

That precious, bleeding Sacrifice,

Which brings Thy grace on sinners down,

And perfects all our souls in one.

. . . . .

By faith we see Thy sufferings past

In this mysterious rite brought back:

And on Thy grand oblation cast,

Its saving benefits partake.

In these paraphrases there are naturally expressions which represent Brevint and not the Wesleys, except in so far as they indicate a general approval of his teaching. The hymns which most closely follow the treatise are often the least happy. Yet, when every deduction is made, this little book is one of the most edifying of devotional preparations for the Communion.

These hymns have had a permanent influence upon Methodist worship. Many of them were probably suggested by the Order of Administration in the Book of Common Prayer, the most beautiful of all the Anglican services. Both the brothers had a profound reverence for the Holy Communion, as the supreme act of Christian worship, and constantly impressed upon Methodists the duty of its regular observance. Never at any time was there a danger of the Methodist Societies cutting themselves off from the Catholic Church by neglect of the Sacraments, or of their becoming an exclusively evangelistic organization on the plan of the Salvation Army. This pamphlet, of which many editions were issued during the lifetime of John Wesley, shows how serious a view they desired their people to take of the value of this sacrament, whilst its great popularity suggests that the intelligence of the Methodists of a hundred and fifty years ago was very much above that with which we are accustomed to credit them. The republication of Brevint’s Treatise, in a small series of devotional manuals, edited by Dr. George Osborn, did not revive interest in it, as it might have done had a judicious selection from the hymns been included.[123]

Several hymns familiar to us in other sections of our hymn-books were written for, or included in, this series. The prayer for the Church militant, with its remembrance of and thanksgiving for those in trouble and for those who have ‘departed this life in Thy faith and fear,’ probably suggested the hymn—

What are these arrayed in white?

whilst the Ter-Sanctus is the inspiration of—

Lift your eyes of faith and see

Saints and angels joined in one.

The thought of communion with the Church triumphant was very precious to Charles Wesley, and there is a most beautiful and solemn appropriateness in the lifting of the eyes as well as of the heart, when, having claimed in faith the forgiveness of sins, we take our unchallenged place at the table of the Lord. The Holy Communion includes fellowship with those who have ‘crossed the flood’ and are for ever with the Lord.

Nor is the other aspect of the communion of saints forgotten. It is often easier for earnest souls to claim fellowship with the white-robed company of heaven than with those on earth who are divided from them by divergencies of doctrine and practice. But if, on the one hand, the Eucharist has been a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence to theologians and ecclesiastics, on the other it is the bond of union between all ‘holding fast the Head.’[124] The true evangelic and the typically Wesleyan position is well stated in the verse—

Part of His Church below,

We thus our right maintain;

Our living membership we show,

And in the fold remain,—

The sheep of Israel’s fold,

In England’s pastures fed;

And fellowship with all we hold,

Who hold it with our Head.[125]

This is the attitude our Church has consistently adopted. We do not claim exclusive privileges or profess that our boundaries are the walls of that city of God which lieth four square. We are but ‘part of His Church below,’ but we are a part, and in obedience to our dying Lord’s command ‘we thus our right maintain.’ What matter though some deny the validity of our ‘orders,’ the efficacy of our sacraments, our title to a place in the Holy Catholic Church? They may drive us from their local altars, but they cannot exclude us from the Lord’s table. They may deny us a place in that family for which our blessed Lord was content to be betrayed into the hands of sinful men. What then? We do not deny theirs.

Fellowship with all we hold,

Who hold it with our Head.

This is a note too seldom heard in Communion hymns. I do not remember to have found it so clearly put anywhere else, though Major Turton’s prayer for unity comes graciously near to it.

For all Thy Church, O Lord, we intercede;

Make Thou our sad divisions soon to cease;

Draw us the nearer each to each, we plead,

By drawing all to Thee, O Prince of Peace;

Thus may we all one Bread, one Body be,

Through this blest Sacrament of Unity.[126]

The sacramental character of the Lord’s Supper as the sign and pledge of the believer’s consecration to the service of Christ is represented in the hymn beginning—

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,

One in Three, and Three in One,

As by the celestial host,

Let Thy will on earth be done;

Praise by all to Thee be given,

Glorious Lord of earth and heaven.

which in some of its verses suggests the prayer known as the First Thanksgiving,[127] though it is based upon a beautiful paragraph of Brevint’s.

A few hymns under the heading ‘After the Sacrament’ form an unimportant supplement, but the long series really ends with a joyous song well-suited to be the happy close of the solemn commemoration of the sacrifice of Calvary and the renewal of the Christian’s oath of allegiance

Let Him to whom we now belong

His sovereign right assert,

And take up every thankful song

And every loving heart.

This final note of glad thanksgiving reminds us that in our Communion Service the ‘Gloria in Excelsis’ immediately precedes the Benediction.[128]

3. Hymns of the Calvinistic Controversy.

From these Communion hymns we pass to a series of a very different type. The story of the Calvinistic controversy—which seemed to show that a theological fountain could at the same time send forth sweet water and bitter—belongs to Church history, not to hymnology. Yet we cannot pass it over, for none of the hymns of the Wesleys meant so much as those which proclaimed the glad tidings of a free and full salvation. The controversy was civil war, a strife among brethren, and it is good to know that the love of Whitefield and the Wesleys was able to bear, though not without terrible strain, even this sore trial. From that great controversy we inherit the true eirenicon, the agreeing to differ, which is the best possible solution of many religious disputes. Whitefield and the Wesleys finally agreed to differ and continued to love. But for a time there was ‘a sharp contention so that they parted asunder one from the other.’

In 1740 John Wesley published, after some hesitation, his sermon on ‘Free Grace,’ and added a long, dull hymn by his brother on ‘Universal Redemption.’ In the same year the brothers issued a second series of Hymns and Sacred Poems, which contained this and other pieces, setting forth in the most emphatic terms the Arminian doctrine, and condemning in even more emphatic terms all who believed in what Calvin had called ‘decretum horribile.’ Whitefield was shocked by the Wesleyan doctrine itself, and was beyond measure distressed by what he saw must lead to a breach between himself and his dearest friends. His love and sorrow come out most attractively in his letters.

‘My dear, dear Brethren,’ he wrote, ‘why did you throw out the bone of contention? Why did you print that sermon against predestination? Why did you, in particular, my dear brother Charles, affix your hymn and join in putting out your late hymn-book?’[129]

John Wesley’s sermon carefully avoided reference to his friend. Whitefield, however, felt in honour bound to state his own views and to ‘answer’ Wesley’s sermon. To this reply he added a poor poem by Dr. Watts, which was intended to balance Charles Wesley’s hymn. Here are two of Watts’s verses—

Behold the potter and the clay,

He forms His vessels as he please;

Such is our God, and such are we,

The subjects of His high decrees.

May not the sovereign Lord on high,

Dispense His favours as He will;

Choose some to life while others die,

And yet be just and gracious still?

After this the battle became fast and furious. The two pamphlets of Hymns on God’s Everlasting Love[130] were issued in 1741, and Whitefield was in despair. He writes: ‘Dear brother Charles is more and more rash. He has lately printed some very bad hymns.’[131] From Whitefield’s point of view they were undoubtedly very bad, and even justify his charge that the Wesleys ‘dressed up’ the doctrine of election in ‘horrible colours.’ On the other hand, these hymns contain some of the finest specimens of evangelic hymn-writing to be found in the Wesley poetry.

They may be readily divided into two classes, the one vigorous and often bitterly satirical onslaughts upon the Calvinistic position, which are more in the style of ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ than in that of ‘Jesu, Lover of my soul,’ the other containing the proclamation of the glad tidings of universal redemption. Both elements are often found in the same composition. This is true of the first of the hymns, a portion of which has been used in Methodist congregations for more than a century and a half, and retains its place in the new hymn-book. I print some verses with the original italics, indicating its polemic purpose.

Father, whose everlasting love

Thy only Son for sinners gave;

Whose grace to all did freely move,

And sent Him down a world to save.

Help us Thy mercy to extol

Immense, unfathomed, unconfined;

To praise the Lamb who died for all,

The general Saviour of mankind.

Thy undistinguishing regard

Was cast on Adam’s fallen race:

For all Thou hast in Christ prepared,

Sufficient, sovereign, saving grace.

Jesus hath said, we all shall hope,

Preventing grace for all is free:

And I, if I be lifted up,

I will draw all men unto Me.

Arise, O God, maintain Thy cause!

The fulness of the Gentiles call:

Lift up the standard of Thy cross

And all shall own Thou diedst for all.[132]

In other hymns he employs the most biting, taunting sarcasm. It is difficult to suppose that these were ever sung even in the thickest of the fight; but they were sown broadcast (price fourpence), and were, no doubt, read with ecstatic delight by those who were on the Wesleys’ side in the great controversy. It is easy at this distance of time and circumstance to condemn the vehemence of the language used on both sides, especially in the later and more acrimonious stages of the controversy. But this was one of ‘freedom’s battles.’ It was magnificent, and it was war. To the Wesleys the doctrine that by the arbitrary decree of God—the God of love!—children were born to a doom which they could neither escape nor deserve was hateful, blasphemous, impossible. If this were indeed the truth of God, what gospel was there to preach? Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die and meet the inevitable doom. Nor could they tolerate what seemed to them the smug satisfaction of ‘the elect,’ to whose certainty of salvation the equal certainty of the damnation of the reprobate added a pleasing flavour. They would not accept salvation on such terms. ‘Take back,’ Charles Wesley cries indignantly,

Take back my interest in Thy blood,

Unless it streamed for all the race.

With a true controversial instinct, the Wesleys fastened upon Calvin’s phrase ‘decretum horribile,’ and, preferring to transliterate rather than to translate, turned again and again to rend it.

A poem describing the possibilities of evil in the human heart and mind comes to a climax thus—

I could the devil’s law receive,

Unless restrained by Thee;

I could (good God!) I could believe

The Horrible Decree.

I could believe that God is hate—

The God of love and grace

Did damn, pass by, and reprobate

The most of human race.

Farther than this I cannot go,

Till Tophet take me in.

But, O, forbid that I should know

This mystery of sin.[133]

Such were the amenities of religious controversy in the eighteenth century!

Again, in a lighter but still intensely earnest vein, he caricatures his adversaries’ teaching—

The righteous God consigned

Them over to their doom,

And sent the Saviour of mankind

To damn them from the womb:

To damn for falling short

Of what they could not do,

For not believing the report

Of that which was not true.

He did not do the deed—

(Some have more mildly raved),

He did not damn them, but decreed

They never should be saved.

This effusion ends in a higher strain, with a dedication of his own life to the proclamation of universal redemption—

My life I here present,

My heart’s last drop of blood;

O let it all be freely spent

In proof that Thou art good:

Art good to all that breathe,

Who all may pardon have:

Thou willest not the sinner’s death,

But all the world wouldst save.

John Wesley tried in his brief tract on the Calvinistic Controversy[134] (1743) to make peace with Whitefield, and some of his concessions are surprising—indeed, he afterwards retracted them. But Charles, who at this time was in the full glow of his early evangelistic triumphs, and who was much less of a theologian than his brother, felt that he was engaged in a holy crusade. He tried to write calmly, he prayed for grace to speak tenderly of those who were erring from the truth he held so dear, but—well, he could not keep silence.

In one of these hymns—a portion of which remains in the Methodist Hymn-book—he prays—

O arm me with the mind,

Meek Lamb! that was in Thee,

And let my knowing zeal be joined

To fervent charity.

With calm and tempered zeal

Let me enforce Thy call,

And vindicate Thy gracious will,

Which offers life to all.

Thou dost not stand in need

Of me to prop Thy cause,

To assert Thy general grace, or spread

The victory of Thy cross.

O may I love like Thee!

And in Thy footsteps tread!

Thou hatest all iniquity,

But nothing Thou hast made.

O may I learn Thy art,

With meekness to reprove;

To hate the sin with all my heart,

But still the sinner love.[135]

These verses might be headed ‘A Prayer before Controversy,’ but it is a shock to the reader on turning the page to find that the next verse shows how soon he descended from this high level.

The controversy was renewed thirty years later with vastly greater bitterness, and with much more personal feeling.

John Fletcher parted in 1771 from his Trevecca students like the saint he was, for he could no longer hold his place when other Arminians were discharged. ‘I cannot give up the possibility of the salvation of all any more than I can give up the truth and love of God.... I left them all in peace, the servant, but no more the president of the college.’[136]

The love of Whitefield and the Wesleys was of the kind which many waters cannot quench; but when Madan, Romaine, Hervey, and Rowland Hill heaped upon John Wesley’s venerable head torrents of vulgar abuse—abuse absolutely impossible, inconceivable in our milder mannered age[137]—Charles felt that there was a point beyond which even Christian charity could not decently go. His refusal to write Hervey’s epitaph is worthy of a Christian gentleman:

Let Madan or Romaine record his praise,

Enough that Wesley’s brother can forgive.

The flowing tide, however, was with the Methodists, and though the fight was long, and the victory was not wholly won in their day, these hymns rendered an inestimable service to the cause of religious freedom. It may be true that they represented Calvin’s teaching one-sidedly, and at times misrepresented it, but it cannot be denied that they pictured current Calvinistic teaching accurately enough. The Wesleys saw clearly that, should belief in a limited redemption spread in their Society, they would but labour in vain and spend their strength for nought. They might have gathered little coteries of devout folk, strongly tinctured with what we now call Plymouth Brethrenism, but they could never have founded a great Church, whose chiefest glory should be its missionary enterprise both at home and in the ends of the earth. The mission of Thomas Coke more than a hundred years ago, the great city missions of our own time, the work of William Booth, of Hugh Price Hughes, and Samuel F. Collier, would have been impossible had they not been able to say anywhere and to all—

Sent by my Lord, on you I call;

The invitation is to all:

Come, all the world; come, sinner, thou;

All things in Christ are ready now!

The Wesleys reached their doctrine of general redemption by two paths. In the first place, they had been trained in the school of Arminius and of Laud, and had been confirmed in the faith by their own careful study of God’s word. But it is abundantly evident that their own experience had led them to believe in the infinite mercy of God. Charles Wesley, especially, argued with the profound humility of the sincere penitent, that his own salvation, of which he had received the undeniable assurance, ‘the indubitable seal,’ on Whit-Sunday, 1738, was itself convincing evidence of the good tidings he proclaimed.

Thy sovereign grace to all extends,

Immense and unconfined:

From age to age it never ends;

It reaches all mankind.

Throughout the world its breadth is known,

Wide as infinity;

So wide, it never passed by one,

Or it had passed by me.[138]

This is a note which constantly recurs in the Hymns on God’s Everlasting Love—sometimes expressed quaintly and unpoetically, sometimes with a pathos truly sublime, as in these verses—

O let me kiss Thy bleeding feet,

And bathe and wash them with my tears;

The story of Thy love repeat

In every drooping sinner’s ears,

That all may hear the quickening sound,

Since I, even I, have mercy found.

O let Thy love my heart constrain,

Thy love for every sinner free;

That every fallen soul of man

May taste the grace that found out me;

That all mankind, with me, may prove

Thy sovereign, everlasting love.[139]

In this, as in other respects, the Wesleyan theology was characteristically Pauline. ‘This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all men to be received that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the chief.’

Hymns of this class have an important place in the story of the Methodist Revival, as well as in the Calvinistic controversy. The vehemence, the violence, with which the Wesleys asserted their doctrine was largely, if not entirely, due to their sense of what it meant to the vast crowds of neglected, ignorant, savage folk who listened with amazement to the messengers who proclaimed God’s love to them.

Sinners, believe the gospel word,

Jesus is come your souls to save!

Jesus is come, your common Lord;

Pardon ye all in Him may have,

May now be saved, whoever will;

This Man receiveth sinners still.

See where the lame, the halt, the blind.

The deaf, the dumb, the sick, the poor,

Flock to the Friend of human kind,

And freely all accept their cure;

To whom doth He His help deny?

Whom in His days of flesh pass by?[140]

And again—

O unexampled Love,

O all-redeeming Grace!

How freely didst Thou move

To save a fallen race!

What shall I do to make it known

What Thou for all mankind hast done?

O for a trumpet voice,

On all the world to call!

To bid their hearts rejoice

In Him who died for all;

For all my Lord was crucified,

For all, for all my Saviour died![141]

This was a new voice crying in the wilderness of dull religious mediocrity or of self-satisfied religious devotion, it was the clarion-cry of one that brought good tidings to the outcasts of Israel.

4. Hymns of the Methodist Evangel

From the first the Methodists made their own experience the starting-point of their preaching. John Wesley desired no help from any who had not ‘the witness in himself.’ His itinerants must set to their seal that God is true. ‘We are witnesses of these things, and so is also the Holy Ghost.’ This personal element, the testimony of the man who believed and therefore spoke, differentiated at once Methodist preaching from the cold impersonal moral essays of the parish church. But Methodist preaching would not have been what it was had John Wesley’s sermons rather than Charles Wesley’s hymns represented Methodism to the masses. John Wesley’s keen intellect held his deep religious fervour in check, but Charles took full advantage of the poet’s licence to say what was in his heart without reserve and without modifying explanations.

His hymns of invitation strike a new note. There is nothing to compare with them in earlier hymn-writers, and comparatively little in later. They are the battle-songs of an open-air preacher, and are borne on the wings of the tempest that raged around the heroic little poet as he faced cheerily the rage or ridicule of the mob. His metres are bright and lilting, winning the ear of the simple and arresting the casual passer-by.

The mercy I feel To others I show,

I set to my seal That Jesus is true:

Ye all may find favour Who come at His call,

O come to my Saviour, His grace is for all!

O let me commend My Saviour to you,

The publican’s Friend And Advocate too,

For you He is pleading His merits and death,

With God interceding For sinners beneath.

And again—

O all that pass by, To Jesus draw near;

He utters a cry, Ye sinners, give ear!

From hell to retrieve you, He spreads out His hands;

Now, now to receive you, He graciously stands.

Only a preacher, perhaps only an open-air preacher, could have written such hymns. They are not hymns of the oratory, of the class-room, or the village church; but of that vast cathedral whose roof is the blue vault of heaven; they are songs of Moorfields, of Kingswood, of Newcastle, and of Gwennap. Perhaps of all Wesley’s hymns these are the most characteristically Methodist. Comparatively few are to be found even yet in any but Methodist books, but in them they hold an unchallenged place, and belong to the whole Methodist family, which has had many a quarrel in Conference, has been many a time by schisms rent asunder, but has never faltered in its loyal and steadfast proclamation of the message of God’s everlasting love.

As a general rule each revision of a Nonconformist hymn-book renders it less distinctive of the denomination it represents, and this is, to some extent, true of the new Methodist hymn-book. It has lost the section with which Wesley’s book opened, ‘Exhorting and Entreating to Return to God,’ but it retains almost all the hymns. Modern writers have seldom succeeded in hymns of this type. A few, however, rank with the best of Charles Wesley’s, who himself never struck a note of yearning sympathy for the erring more true and tender than Faber in his ‘Come to Jesus.’

Souls of men! why will ye scatter

Like a crowd of frightened sheep?

Foolish hearts! why will ye wander

From a love so true and deep?

It is not one of the best signs of the times that hymns of invitation are now for the most part provided by American singers and are of the ephemeral class.

Faber’s exquisite lines, set side by side with such a hymn as Wesley’s

Ye neighbours and friends Of Jesus, draw near,

well illustrate the difference between the cheery, hopeful, out-door evangel of the Wesleys and the subdued earnestness of the pleading of the modern Catholic or Anglo-Catholic missioner. I do not suggest that the comparison is to the advantage or disadvantage of either, but only indicate the difference of the tone of the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century mission hymns. In our day evangelism has lost much of its novelty, and men are less hopeful than they were of the world’s conversion. To the first Methodists it seemed as though any triumph was possible to such a gospel as theirs, and their battle-songs were all songs of victory.

Wesley’s hymns enshrine the history as well as the doctrines of Methodism, and few studies in Methodist hymnology are more interesting than that of the geography of the hymn-book. As to the local setting of ‘Lo! on a narrow neck of land’ there has been much controversy, but it undoubtedly belongs to Jekyl Island, and not to the Land’s End. Charles Wesley wrote to Lady Oglethorpe from Jekyl Island in 1736—

‘Last evening I wandered to the north end of the island, and stood upon the narrow point which your ladyship will recall as there projecting into the ocean. The vastness of the watery waste, as compared with my standing place, called to mind the briefness of human life and the immensity of its consequences, and my surroundings inspired me to write the enclosed hymn, beginning

Lo! on a narrow neck of land,

’Twixt two unbounded seas I stand—

which, I trust, may pleasure your ladyship, weak and feeble as it is when compared with the songs of the sweet psalmist of Israel.’[142]

He did write a hymn at the Land’s End, but it is of quite a different type. It might have been written for St. Augustine of Canterbury on his landing at Ebbsfleet.

Come, Divine Immanuel, come,

Take possession of Thy home,

Now Thy mercy’s wings expand,

Stretch throughout the happy land.[143]

The popular hymn

See how great a flame aspires,

Kindled by a spark of grace!

Jesu’s love the nations fires,

Sets the kingdoms on a blaze—

tells of victory at Newcastle-on-Tyne.

Glory to God, whose sovereign grace

Hath animated senseless stones;[144]

tells of triumph at Kingswood, whilst—

Worship, and thanks, and blessing,

And strength ascribe to Jesus!

is reminiscent of mobs at Walsall and Devizes.

5. Hymns of the Methodist Society

The duty of a Methodist preacher was not simply to sow good seed broadcast, but to gather those who received the word into Societies, where they could be taught, trained, watched over. A large part of John Wesley’s itinerations were for the purpose of confirming and sifting the Societies. In many cases they might be described as Charles Wesley, who had an eye for the humorous side of people and things, describes the Newcastle converts, ‘a wild, loving, staring Society.’ But the converts who remained steadfast were soon led to an intelligent faith and a life of devotion such as is possible only to those who are taught by educated men or their pupils. The debt Methodism owes to Oxford culture is inestimable. The Wesleys were never discouraged by the ignorance of their hearers, but they were never content with it. They had profound faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as a teacher, and prayed, like St. Paul for his simple-minded converts at Philippi, that love might abound in good sense and good taste.[145]

Him Prophet, and King, And Priest we proclaim,

We triumph and sing Of Jesus’s name;

Poor idiots[146] He teaches To show forth His praise,

And tell of the riches Of Jesus’s grace.

No matter how dull The scholar whom He

Takes into His school, And gives him to see;

A wonderful fashion Of teaching He hath,

And wise to salvation He makes us through faith.

To a generation brought up to regard Sankey’s Songs and Solos as the best possible hymns for mission-halls and open-air services, a study of Wesley’s hymns is a liberal education. For the most ignorant of the converts the hymns were the one and only means of culture. They could not read, much of the preaching must have been beyond their comprehension, but the hymns, read slowly, a line at a time, soon became familiar, and the favourite hymns sung over and over again in the house, the class-room, and the family circle, became a part of their very life. Methodist biography shows how the life and death of the saints has been cheered and sanctified by these spiritual songs.

The most important, and by far the largest, part of Wesley’s Collection was devoted to hymns of the Christian life.

It is divided into sections: For Believers Rejoicing, Fighting, Praying, Watching, Working, Suffering, Seeking for Full Redemption, Saved, Interceding for the World. It begins with his own translation of Johann Andreas Rothe’s great hymn

Now I have found the ground wherein

Sure my soul’s anchor may remain,

The wounds of Jesus, for my sin,

Before the world’s foundation slain;

Whose mercy shall unshaken stay,

When heaven and earth are fled away

This is followed by his version of Zinzendorf’s hymn

Jesu, Thy blood and righteousness

My beauty are, my glorious dress.

After these Moravian hymns are a number of Charles Wesley’s, which celebrate the joys of believers, for ‘How should not he be glad, whom the glad tidings have reached?’[147] It is often difficult to understand John Wesley’s principle of classification, but in this section almost every hymn of the seventy-five is obviously well placed under the title ‘For Believers Rejoicing.’ The notes of thanksgiving are very varied, from the calm confidence of ‘Now I have found the ground’ to the simple songs written for him ‘that in God is merry,’ such as

O what shall I do My Saviour to praise,

So faithful and true, So plenteous in grace,

So strong to deliver, So good to redeem

The weakest believer That hangs upon Him!

and

My God, I am Thine, What a comfort divine,

What a blessing to know That my Jesus is mine!

We cannot claim for these hymns that they introduce new songs to the Christian choir. Joy and gladness are common to all who have found salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. Isaac Watts, Philip Doddridge, F. W. Faber, Frances Ridley Havergal, and many more have had ‘the high praises of God in their mouth.’ From the days of the Hebrew psalmists until now the sense of infinite content which comes with the peace which passeth all understanding has been the theme of God’s singers. ‘He satisfieth the longing soul and filleth the hungry soul with goodness.’ Yet joyousness is a special characteristic of Methodist hymns, and especially of those which were written in the early days of the triumphs of the itinerant preachers. No hymns rise higher in their exultant rapture, none are more tenderly triumphant than the songs of Charles Wesley.

His Birthday hymn exhibits the happy enthusiasm of his evangelism.

My remnant of days

I spend in His praise,

Who died the whole world to redeem;

Be they many or few,

My days are His due,

And they all are devoted to Him.

In other hymns he expresses the same joy in living in calmer tones.

The winter’s night and summer’s day

Glide imperceptibly away,

Too short to sing Thy praise;

Too few we find the happy hours,

And haste to join those heavenly powers,

In everlasting lays.

Bright and inspiring as these pieces are, they are in striking contrast with the hymns characteristic of minor religious movements, and justify John Wesley’s claim that ‘in these hymns is no doggerel.’ That they are of unequal merit goes without saying, but it is remarkable how many of them are living hymns to-day. Religious feeling is no more healthy because it loves to pray for guidance ‘amid the encircling gloom,’ or to describe the hosts of the Church militant as ‘pilgrims of the night.’ A ‘sober standard of feeling’ must take into account that the darkness has passed and the true light now shineth.

Yet one who knows little of early Methodism would be surprised to find how ‘sober’ is the tone of most of the hymns provided for the people called Methodists. They are songs in which ‘calmly reverential joy’ is more often heard than ecstasy. It is instructive to turn from Mr. Lecky’s chapter on ‘The Religious Revival,’ in his History of England in the Eighteenth Century to Wesley’s hymns. The uninstructed reader of Mr. Lecky would expect to find here the turbid, involved, hysterical expression of a morbid fanaticism, but he would search almost in vain for illustrations of that side of the Methodist Movement. It is true that both the Wesleys were perplexed by the physical effects of their preaching, and were afraid to treat them as mere manifestations of hysterical excitement. But they dealt with them as St. Paul dealt with somewhat similar phenomena at Corinth, and carefully avoided encouraging such painful and inconvenient interruptions of their services. The hymn-book makes no provision for the nervously excited, and has no compositions of the class characteristic of many ‘revivals’—such, for instance, as are found in Hugh Bourne’s Hymns for Camp Meetings, Revivals, etc. The novelty, the directness of the preaching, and, no doubt, the lack of education of many of the preachers naturally led to indiscretion in many places, especially in the early days of the Revival; but it is fair to judge the Wesleys’ own standard of religious emotion by their hymns rather than by the extravagances of their least intelligent helpers.

Charles Wesley’s hymn, ‘For the Fear of God,’ is a good example of the attitude of soul he desired for himself and for Methodists generally.

God of all grace and majesty,

Supremely great and good!

If I have mercy[148] found with Thee,

Through the atoning blood,

The guard of all Thy mercies give,

And to my pardon join

A fear lest I should ever grieve

The gracious Spirit divine.

Rather I would in darkness mourn

The absence of Thy peace,

Than e’er by light irreverence turn

Thy grace to wantonness:

Rather I would in painful awe

Beneath Thine anger move,

Than sin against the gospel law

Of liberty and love.

But O! Thou wouldst not have me live

In bondage, grief, or pain,

Thou dost not take delight to grieve

The helpless sons of men;

Thy will is my salvation, Lord;

And let it now take place,

And let me tremble at the word

Of reconciling grace.

Still may I walk as in Thy sight,

My strict observer see;

And Thou by reverent love unite

My child-like heart to Thee;

Still let me, till my days are past,

At Jesu’s feet abide,

So shall He lift me up at last,

And seat me by His side.

Perhaps there are few hymns quite of this type, but the subdued and subduing sense of the fear of God pervades many of Charles Wesley’s poems. He dwells much on ‘the mystic joys of penitence,’ as in his brief meditation on Ezek. xxxvi. 26, ‘I will give you an heart of flesh.’

Let me, according to Thy word,

A tender, contrite heart receive,

Which grieves[149] for having grieved its Lord

And never can itself forgive;

a verse which reminds one of Cardinal Newman’s saying that true penitence never forgives itself. This, however, is not what Charles Wesley meant, for he of all Christian poets best understood how truly the pardoned prodigal might make merry and be glad when he was safe in his Father’s house once more.

Lift up Thy countenance serene,

And let Thy happy child

Behold, without a cloud between,

The Godhead reconciled.

An important series of hymns—so important that it demands separate consideration—is that which is found in Sections vii.-ix. of the original hymn-book. They include nearly one hundred pieces, and from the days of John Wesley until the latest revision the section began with a hymn which is the most fitting introduction to the series, since it sets forth with great simplicity the Wesleyan doctrine of Christian perfection. Familiar as this hymn is to Methodists, it is worth while to quote it in full here—

The thing my God doth hate,

That I no more may do,

Thy creature, Lord, again create,

And all my soul renew;

My soul shall then, like Thine,

Abhor the thing unclean,

And, sanctified by love divine,

For ever cease from sin.

That blessed law of Thine,

Jesus, to me impart;

The Spirit’s law of life divine,

O write it in my heart!

Implant it deep within,

Whence it may ne’er remove,

The law of liberty from sin,

The perfect law of love.

Thy nature be my law,

Thy spotless sanctity,

And sweetly every moment draw

My happy soul to Thee.

Soul of my soul remain!

Who didst for all fulfil,

In me, O Lord, fulfil again

Thy heavenly Father’s will!

This hymn is made up, as are many others, by joining together verses from the Short Hymns on Select Passages of the Holy Scriptures. The first verse is suggested by Jer. xliv. 4: ‘Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate.’ The second and third by Jer. xxxi. 33: ‘I will put My law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be My people.’

Another peaceful and attractive hymn on the same subject is based on Heb. iv. 9: ‘There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God.’ Charles Wesley wrote twenty-seven verses; John Wesley selected eight, these are reduced to six in the Methodist Hymn-book. I am inclined to think that a further abridgement would have been still wiser. The four verses which follow are a beautiful meditation on the text—

Lord, I believe a rest remains

To all Thy people known,

A rest where pure enjoyment reigns,

And Thou art loved alone:

A rest, where all our soul’s desire

Is fixed on things above;

Where fear, and sin, and grief expire,

Cast out by perfect love.

O that I now the rest might know,

Believe, and enter in!

Now, Saviour, now the power bestow,

And let me cease from sin.

Remove this hardness from my heart,

This unbelief remove:

To me the rest of faith impart,

The Sabbath of Thy love.

The doctrine of Entire Sanctification, as it was believed and taught by the Wesleys, is set forth in the hymn-book with emphasis, but the expressions are rarely open to serious objection, nearly every phrase having Scriptural precedent. In early days Charles Wesley had often prayed for death, believing that through its gate alone could he find entrance into ‘the land of rest from inbred sin.’ In one of his first hymns, published in 1739, he had written—

Fain would I leave this world below,

Of pain and sin the dark abode,

Where shadowy joy or solid woe

Allures or tears me from my God;

Doubtful and insecure of bliss,

Since death alone confirms me His.[150]

But in later years he had outgrown this mood. John Wesley wrote No against the last line of the stanza, and in his hymn-book gave—

Since faith alone confirms me His.

The brothers taught that sanctification was progressive, yet might be ‘cut short in righteousness,’ a phrase which they often quoted. In one of the hymns for those that wait for ‘full redemption,’[151] Charles Wesley writes—

Surely I have pardon found,

Grace doth more than sin abound,

God, I know, is pacified;

Thou for me, for me hast died;

But I cannot rest herein,

All my nature still is sin,

Comforted I will not be

Till my soul is all like Thee.

See my burdened, sin-sick soul,

Give me faith, and make me whole!

Finish Thy great work of grace,

Cut it short in righteousness.

Speak the second time, ‘Be clean!’

Take away my inbred sin;

Now the stumbling-block remove,

Cast it out by perfect love.

This doctrine of what has been called ‘the second blessing’ is often met with in Charles Wesley, but he used expressions which John disapproved, and would not repeat in his Collection, as in the second verse of the great hymn, ‘Love divine, all loves excelling,’ which reads—

Breathe, O breathe Thy loving Spirit,

Into every troubled breast;

Let us all in Thee inherit,

Let us find that second rest;

Take away the power of sinning,

Alpha and Omega be;

End of faith as its beginning,

Set our hearts at liberty.

John Fletcher suggested that ‘power’ should be altered to ‘love.’

The Wesleys’ teaching concerning sanctification had an immense influence upon Methodist life and thought. ‘The pursuit of holiness,’ to use Dean Goulburn’s phrase, was the daily interest and delight of multitudes of devout souls. No doubt in many cases there was more or less of morbid introspection, but the rich treasury of Methodist biography witnesses to the saintliness of those who made the search for ‘full redemption,’ or, as they delighted to say, ‘perfect love,’ the one serious business of life.

Important and influential as this section of Wesley’s Hymns is, not many of the best are found here.[152] The finest are John Wesley’s translations from the German but only a few original compositions are of marked value. Some exceptions, indeed, must be made, notably—

Love divine, all loves excelling;

and there are many verses inspired by that thirst of the soul ‘for God, yea, even for the living God,’ which is characteristic of no one Church or age, but of all elect souls restless till they find rest in Him. The varying moods of the seeker after God are impressively illustrated. Some of the hymns are of a solemn and even sombre type, while others are bright with assurance of the favour of God and the gladness of the redeemed. Here are a few verses from a

HYMN TO GOD THE SANCTIFIER

Come, Holy Ghost, all quickening fire!

Come, and my hallowed heart inspire,

Sprinkled with the atoning blood;

Now to my soul Thyself reveal,

Thy mighty working let me feel,

And know that I am born of God.

Thy witness with my spirit bear,

That God, my God, inhabits there;

Thou, with the Father, and the Son,

Eternal Light’s co-eval Beam;

Be Christ in me, and I in Him,

Till perfect we are made in one.

Let earth no more my heart divide,

With Christ may I be crucified,

To Thee with my whole soul aspire;

Dead to the world and all its toys,

Its idle pomp, and fading joys,

Be thou alone my one desire!

Be Thou my joy, be Thou my dread;

In battle cover Thou my head,

Nor earth nor hell I then shall fear;

I then shall turn my steady face,

Want, pain, defy, enjoy disgrace,

Glory in dissolution near.

My will be swallowed up in Thee;

Light in Thy light still may I see,

Beholding Thee with open face;

Called the full power of faith to prove,

Let all my hallowed heart be love,

And all my spotless life be praise.

Come, Holy Ghost, all-quickening fire,

My consecrated heart inspire,

Sprinkled with the atoning blood;

Still to my soul Thyself reveal,

Thy mighty working may I feel,

And know that I am one with God!

Of the other type two bright verses on 1 Chron. xxix. 5 are a good example—

Lord, in the strength of grace,

With a glad heart and free,

Myself, my residue of days

I consecrate to Thee.

Thy ransomed servant, I

Restore to Thee Thine own,

And, from this moment, live or die

To serve my God alone.

These two verses belong to the very extensive series of

6. Hymns on Passages of Holy Scripture

Charles Wesley’s poetry is always sanctified by the word of God. In this regard he is unsurpassed, and I think unequalled, by any other writer. He thought and wrote in the language of the Bible, and constantly weaves into his hymns the words, phrases, incidents of Holy Scripture. No one ‘spiritualized’ more boldly than he. Of this his most famous poem, ‘Wrestling Jacob,’ is the great example. Many other hymns illustrate the same power, e.g. this verse, which ‘spiritualizes’ Peter’s deliverance from prison—

Long my imprisoned spirit lay

Fast bound in sin and nature’s night;

Thine eye diffused a quickening ray,

I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;

My chains fell off, my heart was free,

I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

and this, which refers in the same fashion to the resurrection of Lazarus—

Buried in sin, Thy voice I hear,

And burst the barriers of my tomb,

In all the marks of death appear,

Forth at Thy call, though bound, I come.

His more formal paraphrases are often very fine, and are hymns of permanent worth. Such are—

None is like Jeshurun’s God (Deut. xxxiii. 26-29).

Wherewith, O God, shall I draw near (Mic. vi. 6-8).

Away my unbelieving fear (Hab. iii. 17, 18).

Of course Charles Wesley wrote many Psalm-versions. Comparatively few are above the average, but there are some exceptions. Among these are the 48th—

Great is our redeeming Lord,

In power, and truth, and grace.

the 84th—

How lovely are Thy tents, O Lord!

Where’er Thou choosest to record

Thy name, or place Thy house of prayer,

My soul outflies the angel-choir,

And faints, o’erpowered with strong desire,

To meet Thy special presence there.

the 121st—

To the hills I lift mine eyes,

The everlasting hills.

the 125th—

Who in the Lord confide

And feel His sprinkled blood,

In storms and hurricanes abide,

Firm as the mount of God.

Often only two or three verses can be taken from a long poem, as in Ps. iii.—

Thou, Lord, art a shield for me.[153]

and Ps. ix.—

Thee will I praise with all my heart.

Here the whole psalm, as it appears in the Poetical Works, consists of fourteen verses, most of them impossible for singing in a Christian Church, but there are four good verses, especially this, with its tender trustfulness that the humble seeker must at length find his Saviour—

A helpless soul that looks to Thee

Is sure at last Thy face to see,

And all Thy goodness to partake;

The sinner who for Thee doth grieve,

And longs, and labours to believe,

Thou never, never wilt forsake.[154]

The 23rd Psalm is also very beautiful, and is worthy to take its place amongst the many lovely renderings of this sweetest of the praises of Israel. I venture to quote the whole, as it is little known outside Wesleyan Methodism, and not too well known in our own Church. It is the 23rd Psalm read in the light of the tenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel.

Jesus the good Shepherd is;

Jesus died the sheep to save;

He is mine, and I am His;

All I want in Him I have,

Life, and health, and rest, and food,

All the plenitude of God.

Jesus loves and guards His own;

Me in verdant pastures feeds;

Makes me quietly lie down,

By the streams of comfort leads:

Following Him where’er He goes,

Silent joy my heart o’erflows.

He in sickness makes me whole,

Guides into the paths of peace;

He revives my fainting soul,

Stablishes in righteousness;

Who for me vouchsafed to die,

Loves me still,—I know not why!

Unappalled by guilty fear,

Through the mortal vale I go;

My eternal Life is near;

Thee my Life, in death I know;

Bless Thy chastening, cheering rod

Die into the arms of God!

Till that welcome hour I see,

Thou before my foes dost feed;

Bidd’st me sit and feast with Thee,

Pour’st Thy oil upon my head;

Giv’st me all I ask, and more,

Mak’st my cup of joy run o’er.

Love divine shall still embrace,

Love shall keep me to the end;

Surely all my happy days

I shall in Thy temple spend,

Till I to Thy house remove,

Thy eternal house above!

Dr. Watts’s ‘grand design’ in his version of the Psalter was ‘to teach’ the ‘author to speak like a Christian.’ Charles Wesley took St. Augustine’s view, that we ought to hear the voice of Christ in all the psalms. His version of Ps. xlv. is typical of his attitude toward the Psalter as a whole.

My heart is full of Christ, and longs

Its glorious matter to declare!

Of Him I make my loftier songs,

I cannot from His praise forbear;

My ready tongue makes haste to sing

The beauties of my heavenly King.

In 1762 Charles Wesley took advantage of a time of physical weakness to write a large number of verses, forming a kind of running commentary on the Holy Scriptures. They are, for the most part, purely devotional; but the events of the time and, perhaps, of the day on which a poem was written are mirrored in some of the verses. In the preface he says—

Many of the thoughts are borrowed from Mr. Henry’s Commentary, Dr. Gell on the Pentateuch, and Bengelius on the New Testament. Several of the hymns are intended to prove, and several to guard, the doctrine of Christian Perfection. I durst not publish one without the other. In the latter sort I use some severity.

On this point the brothers differed, and especially as to the method of treating those who discredited the doctrine by extravagance in teaching or by inconsistency of life.

The Short Poems account for the enormous number of Charles Wesley’s hymns. On the Old Testament he wrote 1,609, on the New Testament 3,491, a total of 5,100 poetical notes on the Holy Scripture. But very many consist of only one verse.[155] By skilful combination some very good hymns have been made, and in a few instances we come upon a complete hymn of great strength or beauty. Many of these are familiar in Methodist congregations, though probably few worshippers recognize the passages of Scripture which suggested the verses. The well-known hymn

A charge to keep I have,

is the poet’s meditation and prayer after reading Lev. viii. 35: ‘Therefore shall ye abide at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation day and night seven days, and keep the charge of the Lord, that ye die not.’ After reading Lev. vi. 13: ‘The fire shall ever be burning upon the altar; it shall never go out,’ he prays

O Thou who camest from above

The pure celestial fire to impart,

Kindle a flame of sacred love

On the mean altar of my heart!

There let it for Thy glory burn

With inextinguishable blaze;

And trembling to its source return,

In humble prayer and fervent praise.

On the words ‘merciful and gracious’ in Exod. xxxiv. 6 he comments

Mercy is Thy distinguished Name,

And suits the sinner best.

On the twenty-ninth verse of the same chapter, ‘Moses wist not that his face shone,’ he writes

Thine image if Thou stamp on me,

Let others, Lord, the brightness see,

By me unseen, unknown.

As these verses are buried in the last four volumes of the Poetical Works, I venture to quote a few others which have, I think, some special value, reminding one at times of Herbert or Crashaw.

‘The Lord went His way’ (Gen. xviii. 33).

Unwearied let us still request

By instant prayer whate’er we want:

The patriarch from asking ceased,

Before the Almighty ceased to grant.

‘O my Lord, I am not eloquent’ (Exod. iv. 10).

How ready is the man to go

Whom God hath never sent!

How timorous, diffident, and slow

God’s chosen instrument!

Lord, if from Thee this mark I have

Of a true Messenger,

By whom Thou wilt Thy people save,

And let me always fear.

Slow of speech and slower still

Of heart, alas! am I,

Cannot utter what I feel,

Or speak to the Most High:

But I to my Brother look,

Mighty both in word and deed:

He my cause hath undertook

And lives for me to plead.

‘Where hast thou gleaned to-day?’ (Ruth ii. 19).

At evening to myself I say,

My soul, where hast thou gleaned to-day,

Thy labours how bestowed?

What hast thou rightly said or done?

What grace attained or knowledge won,

In following after God?

‘Oh that I knew where I might find Him’ (Job xxxiii. 3).

Where but on yonder tree?

Or if too rich thou art,

Sink into poverty,

And find Him in thine heart.

‘Israel served for a wife’ (Hos. xii. 12).

While Jacob for a wife doth wait,

A length of servile years

(His love to Rachel is so great)

As a few days appears:

And shall I think it long to stay

Or wish my labours passed?

A thousand years are but a day

If Christ be mine at last.

These verses on Num. xi. 27, 28 are in a different strain.

Eldad, they said, and Medad there,

Irregularly bold,

By Moses uncommissioned dare

A separate meeting hold!

And still whom none, but Heaven, will own,

Men whom the world decry,

Men authorized by God alone

Presume to prophesy!

How often have I blindly done

What zealous Joshua did,

Impatient to the rulers run

And cried, ‘My lords, forbid!’

Silence the schismatics; constrain

Their thoughts with ours to agree;

And sacrifice the souls of men

To idol unity!

John Wesley lets this pass without note or comment, but when, on Num. xvi. 10, Charles wrote

Raised from the people’s lowest lees,

Guard, Lord, Thy preaching witnesses,

Nor let their pride the honour claim

Of sealing covenants in Thy name.

he notes on the first line, ‘Query? J. W.’

Here our detailed consideration of Charles Wesley’s hymns must end, though there are many others over which one would be glad to linger. Some of the hymns on Death and the Future Life are of great power, though some have lost and others are losing their hold upon Methodist worshippers. Charles Wesley’s view of death is well illustrated in these verses, which I quote the more readily because, to my regret, they are not found in the Methodist Hymn-book. If they could not often be sung in the congregation, there are times when they would speak the inmost feeling of the devout disciple.

O when shall we sweetly remove,

O when shall we enter our rest,

Return to the Sion above,

The mother of spirits distressed!

Not all the archangels can tell

The joys of that holiest place,

When Jesus is pleased to reveal

The light of His heavenly face.

’Tis good at Thy word to be here,

’Tis better in Thee to be gone,

And see Thee in glory appear,

And rise to a share of Thy throne.

To mourn for Thy coming is sweet,

To weep at Thy longer delay;

But Thou, whom we hasten to meet,

Shalt chase all our sorrows away.

This is not the tone of modern worship. It is open to the charge of that ‘other-worldliness’ of which our time is so impatient and knows so little, but it is the language of the disciples whom Jesus loves. ‘Having the desire to depart and be with Christ: for it is very far better.’ ‘He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus!’

After Charles Wesley, Methodism had no great hymn-writer, though Thomas Olivers (1725-99), one of the early preachers, wrote one of the finest of our hymns of adoration.

He was a man of considerable ability, but Wesley had more confidence in him as a corrector of errors of doctrine than of errors of the press. He left Toplady to be ‘corrected by one that is full his match, Mr. Thomas Olivers,’ but he rejected Olivers as assistant-editor of the Arminian Magazine, because ‘the errata are insufferable.’

‘The God of Abraham praise’ was published at Nottingham in a pamphlet of eight pages, with the title, ‘A Hymn to the God of Abraham. In three parts, adapted to a celebrated air, sung by the priest, Signior Leoni, &c., at the Jews’ Synagogue in London.’ There is only slight verbal resemblance between Olivers’ version and the Hebrew original.[156] He wrote a few other hymns, not to be compared with this, yet indicating considerable poetic power. One of them, ‘On the Last Judgement,’ was published at ‘Leedes.’ It contained twenty verses, and was afterwards altered, and enlarged to thirty-six verses, Scripture references being given in the margin of almost every line. Some verses of this poem have been occasionally used in hymn-books, and Lord Selborne gave twelve verses in his Book of Praise. It is, however, little known. The following are among the best verses.

Come, immortal King of Glory!

Now with all Thy saints appear;

While astonished worlds adore Thee,

And the dead Thy clarions hear,

Shine refulgent,

And Thy Deity maintain.

Lo! He comes with clouds descending:

Hark! the trump of God is blown:

And the archangel’s voice attending,

Makes the high procession known.

Sons of Adam,

Rise and stand before your God!

‘Come, Lord Jesus, O come quickly,’

Oft has prayed the mourning Bride.

Lo! He answers, ‘I come quickly’;

Who Thy coming may abide?

All who loved Him,

All who longed to see His day.

Come, He saith, ye heirs of glory,

Come, ye purchase of My blood,

Claim the kingdom now before you,

Rise and fill the mount of God:

Fixed for ever,

Where the Lamb on Sion stands.

Now their trials all are ended,

Now the dubious warfare’s o’er,

Joy no more with sorrow blended,

They shall sigh and weep no more:

God for ever

Wipes the tear from every eye.

Hail! Thou Alpha and Omega!

First and last of all alone.

He that is, and was, and shall be,

And beside whom there is none.

Take the glory,

Great Eternal Three in One!

Praise be to the Father given:

Praise to the co-eval Son:

Praise the Spirit, One and Seven;

Praise the mystic Three in One.

Hallelujah!

Everlasting praise be Thine.

John Bakewell (1721-1819), a Methodist schoolmaster, wrote several hymns, and is widely known as the author of ‘Hail, Thou once despisèd Jesus.’[157] Benjamin Rhodes (1743-1815), converted under the preaching of Whitefield, and for many years a Methodist preacher, wrote one really fine hymn, ‘My heart and voice I raise.’ Another of the early Methodist preachers, John Murlin, ‘the weeping prophet,’ published a small volume of hymns, some of which are quite as good as most of the eighteenth-century songs.

IV
Eighteenth-century Hymns