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]