'Tis music in the sinner's ears,
'Tis life and health and peace.
Charles Wesley was the poet of the soul, and knew every mood. In the words of Isaac Taylor, “There is no main article of belief ... no moral sentiment peculiarly characteristic of the gospel that does not find itself ... pointedly and clearly conveyed in some stanza of Charles Wesley's poetry.” And it does not dim the lustre of Watts, considering the marvellous brightness, versatility and felicity of his greatest successor, to say of the latter, with the London Quarterly, that he “was, perhaps, the most gifted minstrel of the modern Church.”
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Most of the hymns of this good man were hymns of experience—and this is why they are so dear to the Christian heart. The music of eternal life is in them. The happy glow of a single line in one of them—
Love Divine, all loves excelling,
—thrills through them all. He led a spotless life from youth to old age, and grew unceasingly in spiritual knowledge and sweetness. His piety and purity were the weapons that alike humbled his scoffing fellow scholars at Oxford, and conquered the wild colliers of Kingwood. With his brother John, through persecution and ridicule, he preached and sang that Divine Love to his countrymen and in the wilds of America, and on their return to England his quenchless melodies multiplied till they made an Evangelical literature around his name. His hymns—he wrote no less than six thousand—are a liturgy not only for the Methodist Church but for English-speaking Christendom.
The voices of Wesley and Watts cannot be hidden, whatever province of Christian life and service is traversed in themes of song, and in these chapters they will be heard again and again.
A Watts-and-Wesley Scholarship would grace any Theological Seminary, to encourage the study and discussion of the best lyrics of the two great Gospel bards.