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]