Lo! He comes with clouds descending;
but there is very little trace of Cennick’s hymn in Charles Wesley’s.
Canon Ellerton calls the hymn ‘a recast by Charles Wesley,’ and adds,
‘Cennick’s hymn is poor stuff compared to that into which Wesley
recast it, putting into it at once fire and tunefulness.’ This,
however, is an inaccurate statement of the facts. Probably Cennick’s
hymn suggested Wesley’s, but this is the only share Cennick had in it.
Cennick’s hymn was published in 1752, Wesley’s in 1758. In 1760 Martin
Madan pieced together six verses, five (with some alterations) from
these two hymns, and one from another of Wesley’s. Neither Cennick’s
original nor Madan’s can be compared with Wesley’s fine verses, which
are best left as he wrote them.[166] The following is Cennick’s
original—
Lo! He cometh, countless trumpets
Blow before His bloody sign!
’Midst ten thousand saints and angels,
See the Crucifièd shine.
Allelujah!
Welcome, welcome, bleeding Lamb!
Now His merits by the harpers,
Through the eternal deeps resounds!
Now resplendent shine His nail-prints,
Every eye shall see His wounds!
They who pierced Him
Shall at His appearing wail.
Every island, sea, and mountain,
Heaven and earth shall flee away!
All who hate Him must, ashamèd,
Hear the trump proclaim His day:
Come to judgement!
Stand before the Son of Man!
All who love Him view His glory,
Shining in His bruisèd Face:
His dear Person on the rainbow,
Now His people’s heads shall raise:
Happy mourners!
Now on clouds He comes! He comes!
Now redemption, long expected,
See, in solemn pomp appear:
All His people, once despisèd,
Now shall meet Him in the air:
Allelujah!
Now the promised kingdom’s come!
View Him smiling, now determined
Every evil to destroy!
All the nations now shall sing Him
Songs of everlasting joy!
O come quickly!
Allelujah! come, Lord, come!
Augustus Montague Toplady (1740-78) was a devout clergyman, converted
through the preaching of a Methodist in Ireland. His ‘Arminian
prejudices’ received an ‘effectual shock’ in 1758. His ministry at
Broad Hembury, and in the French Reformed Church, Leicester Fields,
was greatly valued, and his sincere piety impressed all who knew him.
He was one of the most violent opponents of Wesley and Fletcher in the
Calvinistic controversy, and expressed himself in unmeasured terms. He
was a good man, with deep convictions and narrow views. Yet he touched
human hearts as few other hymn-writers have ever done. To have written
‘Rock of Ages’ would have been fame enough for a much greater man than
Toplady. It appeared in a curious and unpromising setting. Toplady was
editing the _Gospel Magazine_, and in 1776 published a _Spiritual
Improvement_ of a Catechism on the National Debt, in which he strives
to estimate the number of individual sins a man may be expected to
commit in the course of his earthly life.
As we never, in the present life, rise to the mark of legal
sanctity, is it not fairly inferrible that our sins multiply with
every second of our sublunary durations?
’Tis too true. And in this view of the matter, our dreadful account
stands as follows:—At ten years old, each of us is chargeable with
315 millions and 36 thousand sins. At twenty, with 630 millions and
720 thousand. At thirty, with 946 millions and 80 thousand. At
forty, with 1,261 millions and 440 thousand. At fifty, with 1,576
millions and 800 thousand. At sixty, with 1,892 millions and 160
thousand. At seventy, with 2,207 millions and 520 thousand. At
eighty, with 2,522 millions and 880 thousand.
We can only admire and bless the Father for electing us in Christ,
and for laying on Him the iniquities of us all; the Son for taking
our nature and our debts upon Himself, and for that complete
righteousness and sacrifice whereby He redeemed His mystical Israel
from all their sins; and the co-æqual Spirit for causing us (in
conversion) to feel our need of Christ, for inspiring us with faith
to embrace Him, for visiting us with His sweet consolations by
shedding abroad His love in our hearts, for sealing us to the day of
Christ, and for making us to walk in the path of His commandments.
_A living and dying_ Prayer _for the_ Holiest Believer _in the
world_.
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee!
Let the Water and the Blood
From Thy riven Side which flowed,
Be of Sin the double Cure,
Cleanse me from its Guilt and Power.[167]
Toplady wrote a good many hymns, but no other compares with this great
universal prayer, probably the best-known and best-loved hymn in the
language. He was essentially a Methodist, his Calvinism being, one
might almost say, accidental. His hymns have the tone and even the
mannerisms of Charles Wesley.[168] Many of them are good devotional
reading. The following verses will remind many readers of some
well-known lines of Charles Wesley—
O when wilt Thou my Saviour be?
O when shall I be clean,
The true, eternal Sabbath see,
A perfect rest from sin?
The consolations of Thy word
My soul have long upheld;
The faithful promise of the Lord
Shall surely be fulfilled.
I look to my Incarnate God,
’Till He His work begin,
And wait ’till His redeeming blood
Shall cleanse me from all sin.
His great salvation I shall know,
And perfect liberty;
Onward to sin he cannot go,
Whoe’er abides in Thee:
Added to the Redeemer’s fold,
I shall in Him rejoice,
I all His glory shall behold,
And hear my Shepherd’s voice.
O that I now the voice might hear
That speaks my sins forgiven!
His word is past to give me _here_
The inward pledge of heaven.
His blood shall over all prevail
And sanctify the unclean;
The grace that saves from future hell
Shall save from present sin.
In no part of the kingdom was the Evangelical Revival more influential
than in Wales. Whitefield, Howell Harris, and, perhaps more than all,
Lady Huntingdon, were the controlling minds, and they led the people
of the Principality to the Calvinistic rather than to the Wesleyan
Methodists. The quaint poetry of Vicar Rees Prichard’s _Welshman’s
Candle_ and the Psalms of Archdeacon Prys seem to have been the songs
of the Welsh Church until William Williams of Pantycelyn arose—a great
light, well worthy to be called the Watts of Wales. His father was
deacon of an Independent Church, which at one time met ‘in a cave
during the hours of twilight,’ for fear of their enemies. Williams
himself was studying medicine, and had no thought of the ministry. One
Sunday morning, as he passed through Talgarth in Breconshire, he went
into the parish church. After the service the congregation gathered in
the churchyard, and Howell Harris, standing on a tomb-stone, preached
with the Holy Ghost and with power. That was the hour of Williams’s
conversion. He prepared for the ministry of the Established Church,
and was ordained deacon in 1740. He acted as curate of two small
parishes for three years, and then, drawn into the current of the
Revival under the influence of Whitefield, David Rowlands, and Howell
Harris, he became an earnest evangelist, travelling throughout the
Principality. His hymn-writing is said to have been occasioned by a
challenge of Howell Harris to the Welsh Calvinistic preachers to write
better hymns than their congregations then possessed. He wrote hymns
by the hundred, and they won an immediate and enduring popularity in
Wales. ‘What Paul Gerhardt has been to Germany, what Isaac Watts has
been to England, that and more has William Williams of Pantycelyn been
to Wales.’[169] He was a great favourite with Lady Huntingdon, at
whose suggestion he prepared a volume of hymns for Whitefield’s Orphan
House. In this work, entitled _Gloria in Excelsis_, some of his best
hymns appeared. In modern hymn-books he is known by two hymns—
Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah!
and
O’er those gloomy hills of darkness.
It is probable that the English version of his greatest hymn was
written by himself, and this seems to indicate that he suffers in
translation, for none of the English versions of his other poems is to
be compared with this. Mr. Garrett Horder thinks that ‘Guide me, O
Thou great Jehovah’ has been largely supplanted by ‘Lead, kindly
Light,’ though the most recent hymn-books do not sustain this
criticism. Keble re-wrote, but failed to improve it; and the same may
be said of those who have made minor alterations. It is, and is likely
to remain, one of the great songs of the Christian pilgrim in his
progress from this world unto that which is to come.
Mr. Elvet Lewis has given several translations of hymns hitherto
unknown to English people, which are good reading, though perhaps none
are likely to attain extensive use. Here are two verses in Williams’s
favourite metre—
Much I love the faithful pilgrims,
Who the rugged steeps ascend;
On their hands and knees they labour
To attain the heavenly end;
To the summit
On my knees shall I come too.
Bruisèd hands, oh! stretch ye upward,
Tired feet, walk ye with care;
The reward, the crown is yonder,
My Belovèd—He is there!
Earth forsaking
Now the journey’s end is all.
Here are two more in another metre, and with the cheery rhythm of John
Newton—
Here I know myself a stranger,
And my native country lies
Far beyond the ocean’s danger
In the lands of Paradise:
Storms of trial blowing keenly
Drive me on this foreign strand;
Come, O South wind, blow serenely,
Speed me to my Fatherland.
Now the air is full of balm
With the fragrance of the land;
And the breezes clear and calm
Tell of Paradise at hand:
Come, ye much-desired regions,
With the best of joy in store;
Country of the singing legions,
Let me reach thy restful shore!
Williams had the spirit of devout enthusiasm which characterized the
Revival; his missionary hymns, though not among the best, are among
the earliest of that class, and he had the rapt devotion to his Lord
which is ever the inspiration of the true hymn-writer.
To Thee, my God, my Saviour,
Praise be for ever new;
Let people come to praise Thee
In numbers like the dew;
O! that in every meadow
The grass were harps of gold,
To sing to Him for coming
To ransom hosts untold![170]
V
Nineteenth-century Hymns