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.