OUR HYMNIC HERITAGE
February 27, 2005
THREE “THE MUSICAL WESLEYS” Part III: Charles Wesley (1707-1788)
Introduction
Although we have already touched on the Charles Wesley’s legacy in relation to our present hymnbook, Sing to the Lord, we want to conclude this seven lesson series on “Our Hymnic Heritage” with one last look at his life and contribution. We will pick up some aspects of his life not previously mentioned as well as a final tribute to what we owe to this “singing Wesley.”
With his elder brother John, “the most gifted and complementary duo in the history of the Church,” we need to remember that for every person who reads just one John Wesley sermon or letter a year, “there are actually thousands who sing at least one Charles Wesley hymn each week and use his words constantly in their prayer and devotional life.” Charles Wesley “is still by far the most popular and most widely used hymnist of the Christian Church, . . . warmly welcomed by just about every branch of Christendom, . . .an ecumenical man in spite of himself.” And as Mitchell delights to point out, Charles Wesley
was the/first Methodist, the real founder of the Holy Club [May 1729], the first of the brothers to be converted, the first to get into field preaching, and first to break with the Church of England in the matter of celebrating Communion in an “unconsecrated building.
One more summary perspective, perhaps most worthy of note, is Manning’s comment that “though Wesley portrays all feelings potently, there is one note in his hymns which rings out clear above all the rest. It is the note of confidence, heavenly and inviolable confidence: The best of all is, God is with us.”
Now to a few observations beyond what we have already seen about Charles Wesley’s
Life
Charles was the eighteenth child of Samuel and Susanna Wesley, the ninth to survive infancy. His life was in doubt for about three weeks, but in the providence of the Lord, he finally made it. As previously noted, he was sent by his father in 1716 at the age of eight to Westminister School under the care of his oldest brother Samuel, the strict churchman among the brothers. There the students spoke Latin at all times. His brother John, five years older, was already at Charterhouse. In 1727 he was elected Student of Christ Church, Oxford, a dull place where only those who wished to study did so. His brother John, then Fellow of Lincoln College, kept him steady.
At Oxford Charles founded the famous Holy Club with his set of friends as the nucleus. But when his brother John returned in 1729 from helping his father at Epworth Charles pressed him to takeover, for Charles recognized his brother’s superior leadership ability, his “inborn authority.” As Mitchell continues,
Charles outgoing nature and affability allowed him to bare his soul and his situation continually. Whatever else bound Charles Wesley, silence, solitude, and taciturnity did not. He did not find it ‘lonely at the top,’ for he was seldom there.
George Whitefield who was also at Oxford soon joined the Holy Club: But it was Charles who was instrumental in his spiritual awakening. So here was “the third man in that incomparable evangelistic trio that was to contest the English-speaking world for Christ.”
Charles “evangelical experience” or “assurance of faith” as we noted in an earlier study took place on May 21, 1738, three days before John’s famous Aldersgate experience. We add to our account there the impact of Martin Luther’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians. In his journal four days earlier, May 17, 1738, he writes that he read how Luther urged the reader to “meditate well” on the “little words me and for me” in Galatians 2:20, “I live by faith in the Son of Good, who loved me and gave himself for me”: “Use thyself to lay hold of this little word me with a sure faith, and apply it to thyself, and do not doubt that thou art of the number named in this little word me.” Interestingly and certainly providentially the writings of the great reformer were used by the Spirit of God to bring both brothers to an awareness of personal faith, for Charles it was Galatians and for John it was Romans. From this time onwards two of Charles Wesley’s “favorite expressions became ‘my great Deliverer’ and ‘my great Redeemer’” as his hymns indicate.
Thus was “born” the great evangelistic team of John and Charles Wesley, John the calm general that directed operations, Charles the brilliant cavalry leader who plunged into the thickest of the fray. Following an initial and intense prison ministry Charles moved to Bristol in August 1739 and made it a center for a fifteen year period of itinerant evangelism, witnessing to small and great in which “he showed extraordinary energy, courage, self-sacrifice, and a power in preaching that surpassed even John’s.” His preaching was often extemporaneous, and some declared him a more a powerful preacher even than Whitefield. But his method had a great shortcoming in his tendency toward insufficient sermon preparation.
From our contemporary “tourist in London” point of view it is noteworthy that in September 1738 Charles Wesley preached in Westminster Abbey on “Salvation by Faith” and conducted the Communion Service. In his early ministry Charles’ message was “the gospel of faith alone, in Christ alone” This message
so welcomed by the condemned criminals of Newgate—was most unwelcome in many London Churches. What criminals accepted as the best of news for the worst of people, the sinners of St. Mary’s Islington rejected as the worst of news for the best of people.”
Interesting are two differences, not unrelated, between Charles and his brother John. We begin with their differences on Christian Perfection. Reacting to their exposure at Oxford to early Eastern patristic mystic writers, John transformed their teaching on Christian perfection into an attainable goal. Charles, however, held to a more original and therefore stricter understanding. Both taught ”the second blessing,” but Charles thought it less “a sudden stroke of grace” than a perfection that “by degrees insensible the Lord shall all our sins expel.” So Charles could pen the lines,
If perfect I myself profess, My own profession I disprove; The purest saint that lives below Doth his own sanctity disclaim; The wisest owns, I nothing know, The holiest cries, I nothing am!
The second difference, noted in our previous study in John’s editing of Charles, is present in the “by degrees insensible” above. Charles, holding a more rigorous standard than John, attempting “to make sense of his lot in later life, . . . linked present suffering (in body and soul) with the process of purging sin and selfishness out of a person.” So Charles “placed a theology of suffering side-by-side with his main theological concern, Christian perfection.” But John always shied away from any suggestion that God would ‘require’ persons to go through desert or darkness states, preferring to interpret such times as evidence of our neglect of our spiritual life. This is ironically one of the places where Charles Wesley most adamantly disagreed with John for one can find several places in Charles’ hymns that reminds one of John of the Cross. Perhaps John Wesley had it just opposite when he somewhat strangely wrote Charles on June 27, 1766, “Go on in your own way, what God has peculiarly called you to. Press the instantaneous blessing: then I shall have more time for my peculiar calling, enforcing the gradual work.”
Charles marriage to his “Sally” was a very happy one, but his “finicky meddlesomeness in John’s complicated romance with Grace Murray, the sea captains widow,” and a charming and tactful lady, was a sad and tragic story. As a result of Charles urging, his brother’s betrothed fiance married some else. At one point it looked “as though the brothers would be utterly sundered apart, and it is doubtful if their relationship with each other was ever the same again.” Friends such as George Whitefield interceded and “only John’s sweet spirit of forgiveness ultimately averted the almost unthinkable rupture.”
But this is not a good place to leave little brother Charles so we turn to his
Hymns
The most significant thing for many of us about Charles Wesley’s hymns is their reliance on Scripture. Charles Wesley’s “every line really is a ‘short hymn on select passages of the Holy Scriptures.’” An example are the lines from the familiar “Jesus Lover of My Soul”:
Thou of life the fountain art, Freely let me take of Thee, Spring Thou up within my heart, Rise to all eternity.
Listen to the following texts from the King James, “For with Thee is the fountain of life” (Psalm 36:9), “Let him take of the water of life freely” (Revelation 22;17), “Then sang Israel this song, Spring up, O well; sing ye unto it” (Numbers 21:17), and “The water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water springing up unto eternal life” (John 4:14). All these texts are plainly recalled in the above hymn lines. This is typical of his hymns”: “The Bible, the whole Bible, nothing but the Bible—this is the theme of John Wesley’s preaching and the glory of Charles’ hymns.”
Charles’ hymns furnished generations of Methodists with a practical commentary on the Bible. From the hymns they learned their theology and how to express it. They learned to read it while listening to the Holy Spirit as they were taught to sing,
Come, Holy Ghost, for moved by Thee The prophets wrote and spoke: Unlock the truth, Thyself the key, Unseal the sacred book.
And
Spirit of faith come down, Reveal the things of God; And make to us the Godhead known, And witness with the Blood: ‘Tis Thine the Blood to apply, And give us eyes to see Who did for every sinner die Hath surely died for me.
Here is the poetic expression of the true Wesleyan answer to the challenge posed by the postmodern age to all religious authority.
In Wesley, Works 7, there is a listing of the scriptural allusions twenty seven pages long (808-834), two columns each page, and that in small print! And this does by no means exhausts the background of Charles Wesley’s hymn lines. Beyond the King James Bible there are evidences of the use of the Greek and Hebrew texts, The Book of Common Prayer, Commentaries then available, the Church Fathers, Hymns, Liturgies, the Mystics, and the English Poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially Milton, George Herbert, Dryden, Prior, and Young, and even his eldest brother’s poetry. An interesting subject to explore would be the influence of the Calvinistic controversies on Charles’ poetry. He wrote some lines against election, but more often was his stress on the universality of grace:
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. . . .
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.’
We do not want to leave our attempt to assess the contribution of the Wesley’s beyond Sing to the Lord without attention to what has been called “the greatest of Charles Wesley’s hymns.” The hymn is “Wresting Jacob” in which he uses the story of Genesis 32:24-32 to tell of his own spiritual crisis, “the story of the agony and joy of every truly repentant and eventually justified sinner.” Isaac Watts is reported to have said that this single poem “was worth all the verses he himself had written.” We quote verses one, two, three, six, and seven of twelve verses:
Come, O thou Traveller unknown, Whom still I hold, but cannot see! My company before is gone, And I am left alone with thee; With thee all night I mean to stay, And wrestle till the break of day.
I need not tell thee who I am, My mercy or sin declare; Thyself hast called me by my name, Look on thy hands, and read it there. But who, I ask thee, who art thou? Tell me thy name, and tell me now.
In vain thou strugglest to get free, I will never unloose my hold; Art thou the Man that died for me? The secret of thy love unfold: Wrestling, I will not let thee go Til I thy name, thy nature know.
Yield to me now—for I am weak, But confident in self-despair! Speak to my heart, in blessings speak, Be conquered by my instant prayer: Speak, or thou never hence shalt move, And tell me if thy name is LOVE.
‘Tis Love! ‘Tis Love! Thou diedst for me; I hear thy whisper in my heart. The morning breaks, the shadows flee, Pure Universal Love thou art: To me, to all, thy bowels move— Thy nature, and thy name, is LOVE.
Conclusion
As our conclusion to this series on “Our Hymnic Heritage” centering on the legacy of Charles Wesley we quote first the British Congregationalist Bernard Lord Manning, and second the British/American Nazarene T. Crichton Mitchell.
Manning writes about three things that “made Charles Wesley different from the pious poetasters of his generation”:
First, there is the full-orbed and conscious orthodoxy of a scholar trained and humbled as he contemplates the holy, catholic, and evangelical faith in its historic glory and strength. The hymns are charged with dogma. . . . This quality in his work puts Wesley in line with the greatest hymn-writers of the Greek Church.
But Wesley, as probably he does not quite reach the excellence of the Greek writers in dogmatic hymns, goes beyond them in another way. For Wesley has not only the full faith to set out; he goes on to tell of a present experience, of its effects in his own life:
What we have felt and seen With confidence we tell.
Lastly, there is something else. There is the solid structure of historic dogma; there is the passionate thrill of present experience; but there is, too, the glory of a mystic sunlight coming directly from another world. This transfigures history and experience. This puts past and present into the timeless eternal NOW. This brings together God and man until Wesley talks with God as a man talks with his friend. This gives to the hymnbook its divine audacity, those passages only to be understood by such as have sat in heavenly places in Christ Jesus, and being caught up into paradise have heard unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a men to utter.
There have been other writers of dogmatic hymns, . . . other writers of hymns reveling a personal experience of religion, . . . there have been other writers of mystical religious poetry. . . . It is Wesley’s glory that he united these three strains—dogma, experience, mysticism—in verse so simple that it could be understood, and so smooth that it could be used, by plain men. You can find a union of these qualities in the great Latin hymns of the Medieval Church, but hardly (I believe) anywhere else.
Finally we end with the summary tribute of Mitchell who from 1975 to the early 1990s taught at Nazarene Bible College in Colorado Springs, Colorado:
Charles Wesley is the most prolific, poetic, powerful, and evangelical hymn writer of the English-speaking Christian Church. His hymns, so solidly based in the letter and spirit of Scripture, and so devotedly Christ-centered and objective, are without peer in our language.
As we attempt to live out our faith and to relate the Gospel to the culture of our day, let us not forget that there is much that remains timeless in “Our Hymnic Heritage”! From the title of Erik Routley’s The Musical Wesleys (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). At All Souls Episcopal recently in their 1982 Hymnal I counted 23 Wesley hymns, and in The Worshiping Church used by the Presbyterian congregation in Rancho Santa Fe I counted 20. We have 20 Wesley hymns in Sing to the Lord., Mitchell, Charles Wesley, 12-13. He comments that “yet there are probably 40 or 50 major biographical studies of John for every one of Charles.” Ibid., 13-14. Manning, Hymns, 73. Mitchell, Charles Wesley, 15. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 34. I doubt that “conversion” is the best word for either Charles’ or John’s May 1738 experiences. Bett, Hymns, 94. See Mitchell, Charles Wesley, 60-71, 127-128. Mitchell, Charles Wesley, 124. Bailey, The Gospel in Hymns, 82-83. Mitchell, Charles Wesley, 78, “always the snare of the extemporaneous preacher.” Ibid., 79. See Michael J. Christensen, “Theosis and Sanctification: John Wesley’s Reformulation of the Patristic Doctrine,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 31:2 (Fall 1996), 91. Wesley, Works 7, 16. Ibid., 7, 16-17. John R. Tyson, Charles Wesley on Sanctification: a Biographical and Theological Study (Grand Rapids: Francis Asbury Press of Zondervan Publishing House, 1986, 262. In “An extract of the Life of Madam Guion,” he writes “utterly false” to her teaching (according to Wesley) “that God never does, never can, purify a soul, but by inward and outward suffering.” Telford, Life, 5:16. The exhortation to Charles begins, “O insist everywhere on full redemption, receivable by faith alone! Consequently to be looked for now. You are made, as it were, for this very thing. Just here you are in your element. In connection I beat you; but in strong, pointed sentence you beat me.” Tyson, Charles Wesley, 292, comments: “But for John Wesley to be making this statement in June 1766 is very strange—especially in view of the shift of emphasis that had occurred in Charles Hymns of the mid-1760s!” Mitchell, Charles Wesley, 102-103. More details can be found there. Hildebrand and Beckerlegge, “Introduction,” Wesley, Works 7, 5. It has been said that “A skilful man, if the Bible were lost might extract much of it from Wesley’s Hymns.” Ibid., 2-3. Sing to the Lord, 636. Hildebrandt and Beckerlegge, “Introduction,” Wesley, Works, 7, 3. See “Appendix C,” 730-735, which presents “Some Heavily Documented Samples.” Wesley, Works, 7, 182. This paragraph is dependent on Mitchell, Charles Wesley, 137-138. See especially Michaael Lodahl, “Theology on the Rough Road to Emmaus: Questioning the Quadrilateral,” in Sam Powell, ed., It’s all About Grace: Wesleyan Essays in Honor of Herbert L. Prince (San Diego: Point Loma Press, 2004), 17-24. See also his monograph, All Things Necessary to Our Salvation: The Hermeneutical and Theological Implications of the Article on the Holy Scriptures in the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene (San Diego: Point Loma Press, 2004). The two most obvious current responses to this challenge to faith in my opinion are those of (1) a rationalistic evangelicalism illustrated by the effectiveness of Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life, and (2) an appeal to ancient Church tradition, which is then felt to be open to the creative voice of the Spirit in every age opening up the Church to new avenues of love and justice. Other current responses are the Radical Orthodoxy movement (premodern) and the “historicism” of contemporary Jesus research (modern).
See Bett, Hymns, 71-169, and Wesley, Works 7, 727-729, “Appendix B,” especially “(c) The Writings of others.” Ibid., 61. Manning, Hymns, 140. Mitchell, Charles Wesley, 155. Mitchell, Charles Wesley, 155. Hildebrandt and Beckerlegge, Wesley, Works 7, 2, note 5. In Wesley’s day “bowels” could mean the seat of tenderness, compassion, or courage. The remaining five verses end with this line. Wesley, Works 7, 250-252, Hymn #136. Manning, Hymns, 27. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 30. Mitchell, Charles Wesley, 143-144.
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Frank G. Carver