The Hymns of Methodism
in their Literary Relations
by
Henry Bett
CHARLES H. KELLY
LONDON: 25-35 CITY ROAD, AND
26 PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.
TO
MY WIFE
First Edition, 1913
PREFACE
The only considerable and competent work that has ever been done, so far
as I am aware, upon the subject dealt with in the following pages, is
contained in some papers which appeared in the Wesleyan Methodist
Magazine more than forty years ago, by the late Rev. John Wesley Thomas,
the distinguished translator of Dante, and in some contributions to the
Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society in recent years by the
late Mr. Charles Lawrence Ford, B.A. I have consulted these, but it is only
fair to myself to say that more than nine-tenths of the references given in
the book are the result of my own reading.
About a fourth of the matter contained in this volume has appeared in the
pages of the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, the Methodist
Recorder, and the Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society. I
make grateful acknowledgements to the Editors of these publications.
HENRY BETT.
Lincoln, 1912.
INTRODUCTION
I
THE METHODIST HYMNS AND ENGLISH LITERATURE
Literary Recognition
It was remarked by Archbishop Trench that the greatest hymn of the
Middle Ages owes much of its modern recognition to the use that Goethe
made of it in Faust. It was this circumstance which ‘helped to
bring it to the knowledge of some who would not otherwise have
known it; or if they had, would not have believed its worth, but that the
sage and seer of this world had thus stood sponsor to it, and set his seal
of recognition upon it.’Sacred Latin Poetry, p. 273.
It would appear that the literary world is waiting for some such warranty
before it realizes that in the early hymns of Methodism we possess a unique
literature of devotion. The rare quality, literary and spiritual, of the
hymns of the Wesleys has passed almost unrecognized for more than a
hundred and fifty years, except among Methodists.
There is a perverse tradition among men of letters that Methodism has no
literature. Leslie Stephen contrasted the literary result of the Oxford
Movement and of the Evangelical Revival, and deplored, in the latter,
‘the absence of any literature possessing more than a purely historical
interest.’History of English Thought
in the Eighteenth Century, vol. ii. xii., p. 101.
This is one of the most amazing judgements to which a critic ever committed
himself. It is surely beyond question, for those who know both books, that
John Wesley's Journal is in its way as absolutely literature as
Newman's Apologia, and what a gulf there is between the pale,
ecclesiastical verse of Keble and the lyrical raptures of Charles Wesley!
The mere fact is that the hymns of Methodism constitute the finest body
of devotional verse in the language, and that the very best of them belong
to the exalted region of the Dies irae, dies
illa of Thomas of Celano, and the Jesu
dulcis memoria of St. Bernard.
The extraordinary fecundity of Charles Wesley as a writer of religious
verse has certainly obscured our sense of the literary value of what he
wrote. No poet can maintain the highest level throughout a dozen volumes.
In the thousands of hymns he wrote there are inevitably many that are
mere versification of evangelical commonplace. But the general quality
of the style is remarkably high, and scattered through this mass of work
there are many scores of hymns, at the least, that are of the very highest
order. The best work of Charles Wesley abides for the universal Church in
the Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists
of 1780--an anthology, selected mainly from the vast mass of his
brother's work by John Wesley--of which so unprejudiced a critic
as Dr. Martineau declared that it was ‘after the Scriptures, the
grandest instrument of popular religious culture that Christendom has
ever produced.’In a letter to Miss Winkworth.
Early Methodism and Literature
The writings of the early Methodists mark an epoch in English
literature. The early eighteenth century was a period when almost every
writer was chilled into conventionality by a false classicism. Addison
represented the perfection of English prose. And, as De Quincey once
declared, in a very discerning paragraph, ‘Addison, in particular,
shrank from every bold and every profound expression as from an offence
against good taste. He dared not for his life have used the word
“passion” except in the vulgar sense of an angry paroxysm. He
durst as soon have danced a hornpipe on the top of the Monument as have
talked of “rapturous emotion.” What would he have said?
Why, “sentiments that were of a nature to prove
agreeable after an unusual rate.”’Works xi., p. 21 (1890).
The writings of the early Methodists marked the first return to simplicity
and sincerity in prose. It was Edward FitzGerald who was the first to point
this out, with characteristic insight and independence of judgement.
‘Another book I have had is Wesley's Journal,’ he
wrote to Professor Cowell. ‘If you don't know it, do know
it; it is curious to think of this Diary of his running almost coevally with
Walpole's Letter-Diary, the two men born and dying too within a
few years of one another, and with such different lives to record.
And it is remarkable to read pure, unaffected, and undying English,
while Addison and Johnson are tainted with a style which all the
world imitated!’
The Methodist Hymns a Lyrical Prelude
And as in the prose, so in the poetry of the age. Appearing at the
very time when English poetry was most stilted and sterile, the hymns
of Methodism became the prelude of a lyrical revival. Wordsworth remarked
that, with one or two negligible exceptions, ‘the poetry of the period
intervening between the publication of Paradise Lost and The
Seasons does not contain a single new image of
external nature, and scarcely presents a familiar
one from which it can be inferred that the eye
of the poet had been steadily fixed upon his
object, much less that his feelings had urged him
to work upon it in the spirit of genuine imagination.’
Essay, Supplementary to the Preface of the Poems.
It would be equally true to say that for a similar period, beginning and
ending a little later, say, from the death of Henry Vaughan to the youth
of Robert Burns, the lyrical note was never heard in these lands. Poetry
had ceased to be ‘simple, sensuous, and passionate.’ Fire
and fervor, the sense of wonder, the arresting note of reality, had all
gone. Lyrical sincerity and spontaneity reappear first of all in the
hymns of Methodism. We hear again the authentic note of passion, and
it betokens much for English poetry in the days to come. A single example
will serve where scores might be adduced. Think of the verve, the
imaginative boldness, the ecstatic fervor of stanzas like these in an
age when English verse was dominated by the influence of Pope--the
lines were published in 1749:
I cannot see Thy face, and live,
Then let me see Thy face, and die!
Now, Lord, my gasping spirit receive;
Give me on eagle's wings to fly,
With eagle's eyes on Thee to gaze,
And plunge into the glorious blaze!
The fullness of my great reward
A blest eternity shall be,
But hast Thou not on earth prepared
Some better thing than this for me?
What, but one drop! one transient sight!
I want a sup, a sea of light.
II
THE SOURCE AND DATE OF THE EARLIEST METHODIST HYMNS
John Wesley's Earliest Translations
The earliest of the hymns of Methodism were written during John
Wesley's residence in America. One of the most interesting passages
in the first volume of the Standard Edition of Wesley's Journal
is that in which we are given a page from Wesley's Diary for 1736,
containing the text of four of his hymns. Hitherto the only knowledge we
have had as to any hymn written in that year has been the reference in
the Plain Account of Christian Perfection, where Wesley wrote
‘We embarked for America in the latter end of 1735. It was the next year,
while I was at Savannah, that I wrote the following lines:
Is there a thing beneath the sun
That strives with Thee my heart to share?
Ah! tear it thence, and reign alone,
The Lord of every motion there!’
It was in 1736, therefore, that he made his great version of
Tersteegen's Verborgne Gottes Liebe
du,
‘Thou hidden love of God, whose height,’
which Emerson declared to be the greatest hymn in the language. Now we have
to add the four hymns from the Diary for that year. ‘We
do not know the date of the writing,’ remarks Mr. Curnock, ‘but it
must have been some weeks earlier than December, 1736.’ These five hymns
are the earliest of the hymns of Methodism: they are all translations from the
German, they are all the work of John Wesley, and they all date
from the first year of his sojourn in Georgia. Not only are these the first
hymns of which we have any knowledge, but it is almost certain that they
are the very first that John Wesley ever wrote. He began to learn German
at the beginning of the voyage, on October 17, 1735, and the Diary
for 1736 has many entries such as ‘German,’ ‘verses,’
‘translated German,’ ‘made verses.’
These entries, which show that he
was working at German hymns, begin in May, 1736, and these hymns date
from the next few months. The hymns in the Diary (except the first) have
numbers attached--a valuable detail--and three of the four were previously
known to be translations from Freylinghausen, Richter, and Zinzendorf. The
fourth had never been published before, and there was some doubt as to
whether it was a translation or an original hymn of Wesley's, until the
present writer discovered, in searching through Knapp's
Evangelischer Liederschatz, that it was
a version of Paul Gerhardt's
Ich singe dir mit Herz und Mund.
The first lines of these hymns and
the numbers, as given in the Diary, are as follows:
| ‘O Jesu, Source of calm repose.’ |
| 124 | ‘My soul before Thee prostrate lies.’ |
| 215 | ‘Jesu, to Thee my heart I bow.’ |
| 306 | ‘To Thee with heart and mouth I sing.’ |
Mr. Curnock suggested in a note that these numbers prefixed to the hymns
might possibly give a clue to the ‘original source whence they were
drawn before translation.’
The German Source
Some time ago, the writer became the happy possessor of a copy of the
1737 edition of Das Gesang-Buch der Gemeine in
Herrn-Huth--the hymnal of the Moravians at Herrnhut. This, except
for a few corrections and an appendix, is an exact reprint of the first
edition of 1735. On looking for the originals of the hymns in the Diary,
it appeared that the numbers were the numbers of the pages in this book.
On p. 724 (the printed number, 124, is a very natural mistake, due to
Wesley's faded writing) is Hier legt
mein Sinn sich vor dir nieder, on p. 215
Reiner Bräut'gam meiner Seele,
and on p. 306 Ich singe dir mit Herz und
Mund.
There are no tunes in the Herrnhut Gesangbuch, but the names of
familiar chorales are put at the head of some of the hymns, and at the
beginning of the book there is a table in which the hymns are grouped
according to metre, some of the sections having an asterisked number at
their head. This number, as the preface explains, refers to the page of
the Halle Gesangbuch where
a suitable melody may be found. What is meant
by the Halle Gesangbuch is evidently Freylinghausen's
hymnal, the accepted collection of the
Pietists, whose head quarters were at Halle. In
the Library of Richmond College are Wesley's
copies of the Herrnhut Gesangbuch and of
Freylinghausen's Gesangbuch. We now know that
Wesley had both books in his possession in
Georgia in 1736, or, at any rate, had access to
them there, for under the date, Sunday, November
21, in that year, there is an entry in his
Diary: ‘Freylinghausen's Gesangbuch with
Delamotte,’ and the numbered hymns in the Diary
prove that he used the Herrnhut Gesangbuch
then. Most of those who were aware that
Wesley possessed both books seem to have
thought that these were merely two different
hymnals, without any special relation, and it has
been suggested that he drew upon each of them
for his translations. But the unquestionable fact
is that his copy of Freylinghausen's Gesangbuch
was Wesley's tune-book: it was simply the musical
companion of the Herrnhut hymnal. There
remains no possible doubt about this. All the
thirty-three hymns that Wesley translated are
found in the Herrnhut Gesangbuch, many of them
are found nowhere else, and--as we have seen--where
he attached a number it was that of
the page in this book, despite the fact that two
of the three numbered hymns are found in Freylinghausen
also. It is plain that he did not use
Freylinghausen for the hymns which the book contained, but merely for
the tunes.
Seven of the hymns that Wesley translated are by Zinzendorf;
four by Gerhardt;
four by Scheffler;
two by Tersteegen;
two by Freylinghausen;
two by C. F. Richter;
one each by
Ernst Lange, Joachim Lange, W. C. Dessler, J. J. Winckler,
J. A. Rothe, Anna Dober, Maria Böhmer, Gottfried Arnold,
Sigismund Gmelin, L. A. Gotter, and A. G. Spangenberg;
and one is a cento from four hymns by Zinzendorf, Johann Nitschmann,
and Anna Nitschmann.See
Appendix I. for a complete list of the German
hymns and their writers.
Pietists and Moravians
It should be noted that the bulk of these
writers are Pietists and Moravians.
Freylinghausen (1670-1739) was the son-in-law and successor of A. H. Francke,
the founder of the Orphan House at Halle.
C. F. Richter (1676-1711) was the physician of the Orphan House.
Joachim Lange (1670-1744) was Professor of Divinity at Halle.
J. J. Winckler (1670-1722) was a Pietist clergyman.
Gottfried Arnold (1666-1714), a distinguished ecclesiastical historian,
was a disciple of Spener, the founder of Pietism.
Ludwig Andreas Gotter (1661-1735), who was Hofrat at Gotha, had
relations with Pietism.
Sigismund Christian Gmelin (1679-1707) was a Separatist who had
a variegated career, but was in touch with
Pietists all his life.
Maria Magdalena Böhmer (167?-1743) was a Pietist who contributed three
hymns to Freylinghausen's collection.
Then, in addition to Zinzendorf, there are three other Moravians whose
hymns Wesley translated.
J. A. Rothe (1688-1758) was appointed by the Count to the pastorate of
Berthelsdorf, the parish in which Herrnhut was situated,
Anna Dober (1713-39) (nèe Schindler) was the wife of
Leonhard J. Dober, one of the bishops of the Brethren,
and A. G. Spangenberg (1704-1792), who had been Assistant Professor of
Divinity at Halle, was the most learned and lovable of the Moravians,
and became also one of their bishops.
Thus, excepting the classical hymns of Gerhardt (1607-1676),
Scheffler (1624-1677), and Tersteegen (1697-1769), practically all
the rest of the hymns that Wesley translated were the product of the
two great and closely related spiritual movements that had their head
quarters at Halle and at Herrnhut.
The translations from the German were all published between 1737 and 1742.
They were probably all written by 1739.
John Wesley and the German Language
Apparently Wesley disused German after his breach with the Moravians
in 1740. In November, 1745, when many German troops were encamped on the
Town Moor at Newcastle-on-Tyne, in consequence of the Rebellion, he wrote
in his Journal: ‘I observed many Germans standing
disconsolate at the skirts of the congregation. To these I was constrained
(though I had discontinued it so long) to speak a few words in their own
language. Immediately they gathered up close together, and drank in every
word.’ This, of course, refers to disuse of the spoken language, but it is
significant that no German books are mentioned in the Journal after
the earliest period, while French books are often referred to. Yet, on the
other hand, he read Bengel's Erklärte
Offenbarung Johannis
as late as 1754, for use in his Notes on the New Testament. It is
probable, however, that this was merely a case of furbishing up his German
to read a book of which he was in special need. In his knowledge of German,
as in so much else, Wesley was a pioneer. It was not until the end of the
eighteenth century, at the time when the fame of Goethe and Schiller was
filtering through into England, that Englishmen began to regard German as
a language worth learning. It would be possible to count on the fingers of
one hand the distinguished Englishmen who knew German in 1740.
Translated Hymns
John Wesley's versions of German hymns are amongst the very finest
examples of translated verse in the language. They stand the supreme test
of a translator's art, for they are as vigorous and as poetical as the
originals. They read as if they
had been written in English. His own standard of translation varied.
Sometimes his version is as literal as it could be, to retain freedom of
poetical movement, as, for example, in the stanza:
O Love, Thou bottomless abyss!
My sins are swallowed up in Thee.
Covered is my unrighteousness,
Nor spot of guilt remains on me,
While Jesu's blood, through earth and skies
Mercy, free, boundless mercy, cries!
which renders the German verse:
O Abgrund, weicher alle Sünden
Durch Christi Tod verschlungen hat!
Das heisst die Wunde recht verbinden,
Da findet kein Verdammen statt,
Weil Christi Blut beständig schreit,
Barmherzigkeit! Barmherzigkeit!
In other hymns, again, the English does little
more than express the central thought of the
German, as in the lines:
Through Thy rich grace, in Jesu's blood
Blessing, redemption, life we find.
Our souls washed in this cleansing flood,
No stain of guilt remains behind.
Who can Thy mercy's stores express?
Unfathomable, numberless!
which are a version of the German stanza:
Du segnest uns in ihm, dem Herm,
Mit überschwenglich reichem Segen,
Und gehest unser Armut gern
Mit deiner theurern Gnad’ entgegen,
Was sind wir doch, du allerschönstes Gut,
Dass deine Lieb’ so Grosses an uns thut?
John Wesley learned some Spanish while in Georgia, in order to minister
to a few Spanish Jews who were in the colony. He translated one Spanish hymn,
‘O God, my God, my all Thou art!’--a fine version of Psalm 68.
The Spanish source has never been traced.
Charles Wesley's Earliest Hymns
The earliest of Charles Wesley's hymns appear to have been those entitled
‘A Hymn for Midnight’ (‘While midnight shades the earth o'erspread’),
‘Written in the Beginning of a Recovery from Sickness’
(‘Peace, fluttering soul! the storm is o'er’),
and ‘After a Recovery from Sickness’ (‘And live I yet by power divine?’).
The first of these probably dates from the early months of 1738; the others
were certainly written during that period. But the real beginning of Charles
Wesley's work as the poet of Methodism came with the wonderful experience
of May 21, 1738. Immediately thereafter he wrote three hymns which have a
new accent.
‘Where shall my wondering soul begin?’
is almost certainly the
hymn referred to in the entry in his Journal for May 24, ‘Toward ten my
brother was brought in triumph by a troop of our friends, and declared,
“I believe!” We sang the hymn with great joy.’
‘And can it be that I should gain’ is colored throughout by reminiscences
of a passage in Luther's Galatians that be had read on May 17.
‘What morn on thee with sweeter ray’ is entitled
‘Congratulations to a Friend on believing in Christ,’ and was
unquestionably addressed to his brother at this time.
These hymns, the firstfruits of Charles Wesley's genius, were all
first published in the Hymns and Sacred Poems of 1739. From that
year onward his hymns appeared in a stream of publications that only ceased
in 1785--three years before his death.
CHAPTER I
THE SCRIPTURES
apo
blefouV ta iera grammata oidaV
Many Allusions to Scripture
‘In the year 1729,’ wrote John Wesley, ‘I began not only to read but to
study the Bible.’ The results of that devoted study of the Word of God
are to be seen in every page that he wrote. Both the brothers must have
had a most profound, exact, and extensive acquaintance with the Scriptures.
Indeed, it is only a close study of the Bible on our own part that can
reveal to us the extent of their intimacy with it. There can hardly be
a single paragraph anywhere in the Scriptures that is not somewhere
reflected in the writings of the Wesleys. The hymns, in many cases, are
a mere mosaic of biblical allusions. Here is a stanza--and many
others would have served equally well--where there is a distinct
quotation of Scripture in every line:
Behold the servant of the Lord!
I wait Thy guiding eye to feel,
To hear and keep Thy every word,
To prove and do Thy perfect will;
Joyful from my own works to cease,
Glad to fulfil all righteousness.
These six lines recall the following six passages in the Authorized
Version:
‘And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord’
(Luke 1:38).
‘I will guide thee with Mine eye’
(Ps. 32:8).
‘If a man love Me he will keep My words’
(John 14:23).
‘That ye may prove what is that good and
acceptable and perfect will of God’
(Rom. 12:2).
‘For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his
own works, as God did from His’
(Heb. 4:10).
‘For thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness’
(Matt. 3:15).
The Prayer-Book Psalter
But the most interesting points with regard to the Wesleys and the
Authorized Version are naturally their many divergencies from it. They
often used, and sometimes deliberately preferred to use, the older version
of the Psalms (substantially Coverdale's) which is retained in the
Book of Common Prayer. As devout Churchmen they had been familiar
with this from childhood, and in many cases their use of it was
doubtless merely casual. But there are other instances in which they
remembered both versions, and combined or contrasted them.
Much of Charles Wesley's language and thought was colored by
renderings in this version. Thus
the words of Ps. 27:16 ‘O tarry thou
the Lord's leisure,’ are recalled in many of his verses:
Fainting soul, be bold, be strong,
Wait the leisure of thy Lord;
Though it seem to tarry long,
True and faithful is His word.
And the language of Ps. 45:4, ‘Gird Thee with
Thy sword upon Thy thigh, O Thou most Mighty,
according to Thy worship and renown,’ is closely
paraphrased in another hymn:
Gird on Thy thigh the Spirit's sword,
And take to Thee Thy power divine;
Stir up Thy strength, Almighty Lord,
All power and majesty are Thine;
Assert Thy worship and renown;
O all-redeeming God, come down!
In a poetical paraphrase of Ps. 84, both versions of the eleventh
verse are utilized, ‘For the Lord God is a light and a defence’ (P.B.V.),
‘For the Lord God is a sun and shield’ (A.V.):
God is a sun and shield,
A light and a defence,
With gifts His hands are filled,
We draw our blessings thence.
The earlier version of Ps. 99:1,
‘The Lord is King, be the people never so impatient,’ is
remembered in the opening verse of a hymn--
The Lord is King, and earth submits,
Howe'er impatient, to His sway,
Between the cherubim He sits,
And makes His restless foes obey.
So a clause from Ps. 139:23, ‘Try me, O God,
and seek the ground of my heart,’ is remembered in another hymn--
Try us, O God, and search the ground
Of every sinful heart!
Whate'er of sin in us is found,
O bid it all depart!
Many other examples might be quoted. There is one, however, of unusual
interest. In Ps. 74:12, where the Authorized Version
with the Hebrew,
Septuagint, and Vulgate, has ‘For God is my King of old, working
salvation in the midst of the earth,’ the Prayer-Book Version
renders ‘For God is my King of old; the help that is done upon
earth, He doeth it Himself.’ This is following Luther,
‘der alle Hilfe thut, so auf Er den
geschieht,’ and the Zurich Bible,
‘du der alles heyl und hilff (das in der
gantzen welt geschieht) allein thust.’
It is reproduced in one of the hymns:
A feeble thing of nought,
With lowly shame I own
The help that upon earth is wrought
Thou dost it all alone.
John Wesley emphatically preferred this rendering.
He wrote in his Journal, under the date
October 14, 1785, ‘I preached in the evening in
the old Temple Church, on Ps. 74:12. In
the old translation it runs, “The help that is
done upon earth, God doeth it Himself.” A
glorious and important truth! In the new,
“Working salvation in the midst of the earth.”
What a wonderful emendation! Many such
emendations there are in this translation; one
would think King James had made them himself.’
In another passage in the Journal, a year
and a half later, April 22, 1787, he refers to the
text and translation again: ‘I opened and
applied that glorious text, “The help that is
done upon earth, He doeth it Himself.” Is it
not strange that this text, Ps. 74:12, is
vanished out of the new translation of the Psalms?’
Notwithstanding Wesley's uncritical scorn of the ‘emendation,’ it is
the only correct rendering. He was very old, and very busy, or a glance at
his Hebrew Bible would have shown him that the Authorized Version was
unquestionably right.
John Wesley's Revision of the New Testament
In the Notes on the New Testament Wesley freely revised the
Authorized Version. And it has never yet been sufficiently recognized
that in this (as in so much else) he was wonderfully ahead of his age.
Wesley's version, issued in 1754, was a marvellous anticipation of the
Revised Version of a hundred and thirty years later. We have tested
three chapters, chosen haphazard, and find that in these chapters Wesley
introduced sixty-one changes into the text. Out of these sixty-one
changes he anticipated the reading of the Revised Version in thirty-two
cases. Moreover, it is nearly always in the more serious alterations
that the Revisers agree with him. There must be in the whole New Testament,
say, 3,000 changes in the text of the Authorized Version, in which Wesley
anticipated the Revisers of 1881. And he anticipated them in the
arrangement of the text into paragraphs.
The Wesleys and the Greek Testament
Behind all this there was, of course, an intimate knowledge of the
Greek Testament. John Wesley was Greek Lecturer at Lincoln College,
and that did not mean that he had to do with Hellenic studies (as some who
have written about it have assumed), but that he lectured on the Greek
Testament. One of the early Methodist preachers recorded that Wesley
could always remember the Greek of a passage in the New Testament,
even when he was at a loss for the exact language of the Authorized
Version. And Charles Wesley, like his brother, had a devout scholar's
knowledge of the New Testament in the original.Dr. Adam Clarke
says that John Wesley used the O mirificam edition of the Greek
Testament, printed by Stephens, at Paris, in 1546.
This intimacy with the Greek Testament appears in many delightful
ways in their writings, as well as in the revised text given in the
Notes on the New Testament. Naturally it is most
easily discerned where the Authorized Version is defective. Many scores
of examples might be quoted.
Mistranslations in the Authorized Version
There are a few absolute mistranslations in the Authorized Version.
One of the worst is in Philip. 2:7, where
‘made Himself of no reputation’ represents the Greek
eauton ekenwte ‘emptied Himself.’
The translators of 1611 were apparently afraid of the Apostle's
bold and simple word. Wesley removed the futile circumlocution of
the Authorized Version and gave the only possible rendering, as
the Revised Version did later. Wherever the passage is referred
to in the hymns, the proper equivalent of the Greek is given--
He left His Father's throne above,
So free, so infinite His grace!
Emptied Himself of all but love,
And bled for Adam's helpless race.
To Thee, who from the eternal throne,
Cam'st emptied of Thy glory down,
For us to groan, to bleed, to die!
There is another passage in Philippians where the translation,
inadequate to begin with, became still more unsatisfactory through
the change in meaning of an English word. The Authorized
Version of Philip. 3:20 is ‘For our conversation is in heaven.’
The Greek is
politeuma,
‘citizenship,’ and the Revised Version reads accordingly, ‘For
our citizenship is in heaven.’ The poet evidently
had the original in mind when he wrote--
To me the victor's title give
Among Thy glorious saints to live.
And all their happiness to know,
A citizen of heaven below.
The Greek Article
Again, one of the striking defects of the Authorized Version is
its strange indifference as to the presence or absence of the Greek
article -- a characteristic largely due to the influence of the Vulgate.
The Authorized Version of 2 Tim. 4:7 is, ‘I
have fought a good fight,’ but the Textus Receptus is,
ton agwna ton kalon
‘the good fight.’ So Wesley rendered it in the Notes,
and the force of the article is remembered in more than one hymn--
I the good fight have fought,
O when shall I declare?
The victory by my Savior got
I long with Paul to share.
There is only one ‘good fight’--what the
Apostle calls elsewhere ‘the good fight of faith.’
The very next verse, of Scripture furnishes another example of the same
thing. The Authorized Version translates ‘Henceforth there is laid up
for me a crown of righteousness.’ But the Greek is
o ths dikaiosunhV
stefanoV ‘the crown of righteousness.’ So
Wesley renders it in the Notes. And so constantly in the hymns:
The glorious crown of righteousness
To me reached out I view,
Conqueror through Him, I soon shall seize
And wear it as my due.
Different Words in the Original
Again the Authorized Version frequently ignores that important
canon of translation which ordains that different words in
the original shall be rendered by different words in the version. It
is well known that there are two words in the Greek Testament, both of
which the Authorized Version renders ‘crown,’
diadhma
and stefanoV.
The former is the kingly ornament, the royal crown. The word only occurs
thrice, in the whole of the New Testament, and all the three instances
are in the Apocalypse--the ‘seven diadems’ of the dragon
(Rev. 12:3), the ‘ten
diadems’ of the beast (Rev. 13:1), and the
‘many diadems’ of Christ (Rev. 19:12). In
each case Wesley, in the Notes, retained the
original word, as the Revisers did in 1881.
One of the hymns, too, remembers the word--
And who in Christ are found,
They His diadem shall wear,
With life and glory crowned.
The other word,
stefanoV,
is much more frequent, and it is poorly represented by the English
‘crown,’ since it never means the badge of royalty, as the English
word generally does. The significance of the word has been beautifully
defined by Archbishop Trench, in his Synonyms of the New Testament.
‘It is the crown of victory in the games, of civic worth, of military
valor, of nuptial joy, of festal gladness--woven of oak, of ivy, of
parsley, of myrtle, of olive--or imitating in gold these leaves or
others--of flowers, as of violets or roses, the “wreath,”
in fact, or the “garland,” the German “Kranz”
as distinguished from “Krone.”’ This is the word consistently
used in the New Testament of the rewards of the faithful; the
stefanoV of life,
of glory, of righteousness. It is this which is used
in Rev. 2:10,
‘Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee the crown
of life,’ ton
stefanoV thV zohV.
The passage is quoted in many of the hymns, and the proper
significance of the word is brought out in nearly every case.
Be faithful unto death,
Partake My victory,
And thou shalt wear this glorious wreath,
And thou shalt reign with Me.
And so in references to 2 Tim. 4:8--
The glorious wreath which now I see
The Lord, the righteous Judge, on me
Shall at that day bestow.
In John 13:10 the Authorized Version is, ‘He that is washed
needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit.’
This fails to distinguish between the two Greek verbs upon
which the whole meaning of the passage turns, and which should be
rendered as in the Revised Version, ‘He that is bathed
(o leloumenoV)
needeth not save to wash
(niyasqai)
his feet.’ The point is remembered in a hymn--
If bathed in Thine atoning blood,
Am I not every whit made clean?
My care is now to wash my feet,
And if I humbly walk with Thee,
Sin I need never more repeat,
Or lose my faith and purity.
There is a remarkable example of this in regard to Heb. 4:9,
‘There remaineth, therefore, a rest to the people of God’ (A.V.).
The word here translated ‘rest,’
sabbatismoV,
is one which means ‘a keeping of the Sabbath,’ and it stands
in deliberate contrast to the ordinary word ‘rest,’
katapausiV,
which occurs eight times in the immediate context. The only satisfactory
translation, of course, is one which marks the difference, like
that of the Revised Version, ‘A promise being
left of entering into His rest . . . For we which
have believed do enter into rest . . . As I sware
in My wrath, They shall not enter into My rest . . .
There remaineth therefore a sabbath-rest for
the people of God.’ Now recall the lines:
Lord, I believe a rest remains
To all Thy people known,
A rest where pure enjoyment reigns,
And Thou art loved alone.
O that I now the rest might know,
Believe, and enter in!
Now, Savior, now the power bestow,
And let me cease from sin.
Remove this hardness from my heart,
This unbelief remove;
To me the rest of faith impart,
The sabbath of Thy love!
In 1 Peter 5:7
two different Greek words are used where the Authorized
Version would suggest the same word: ‘Casting all your care
(merimnan)
upon Him, for He careth
(melei)
for you.’ The first word should, of course, be rendered ‘anxiety,’
or ‘trouble.’ The point is remembered in a hymn based upon the
passage--
O Lover of sinners, on Thee
My burden of trouble I cast,
Whose care and compassion for me
For ever and ever shall last.
Vivid or Unusual Words
Again, the Authorized Version did not always do justice to the
vivid or unusual character of a word in the text. It rendered
Philip. 4:7, ‘The peace of God shall keep your hearts.’ The
Revised Version ‘guard’ is much better, but the Apostle's word,
frourhsei,
means ‘to keep with a military guard.’ It is the same
word that he uses in 2 Cor. 11:32. ‘In Damascus
the Governor under Aretas the King kept-with-a-garrison
(efrourei)
the city of the Damascenes, desirous to apprehend me.’ Wesley remembered
this in dealing with Philip. 4:7 in the Notes.
His comment is
‘Shall guard, as a garrison does a city.’ Again the point was
recollected in a hymn--
My strength, the joy Thy smiles impart,
Thy peace doth garrison my heart.
The Authorized Version of Matt. 28:9 is,
‘Go ye therefore, and teach all nations,’ but the
word does not here represent the usual Greek
verb (which occurs in the next sentence, ‘teaching
(didaskonteV)
them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you’), but
maqheusate
‘make-ye-disciples-of.’ This is remembered in a hymn ‘At the
Baptism of Adults’--
We now Thy promised presence claim
Sent to disciple all mankind,
Sent to baptize into Thy name,
We now Thy promised presence find.
The Authorized Version of a phrase in Col. 1:13 is ‘His dear Son,’
but the Greek is literally translated by the Revised Version, ‘the Son of
His love.’‘We are the sons of God's grace, He alone is the
Son of His love.’ (Dr. Forsyth, Positive Preaching, p. 254.)
John Wesley was clearly thinking of the exact language of the Apostle
when he wrote--
Son of Thy Sire's Eternal Love,
Take to Thyself Thy mighty power,
Let all earth's sons Thy mercy prove,
Let all Thy bleeding grace adore!
It is well known that the word in John 14:18,
rendered ‘comfortless’ in the Authorized Version, and ‘desolate’ in the
Revised Version, is
orfanouV,
literally, orphans. This is remembered in a hymn for Whit-Sunday--
. . . Orphans we
Awhile Thine absence mourn,
But we Thy face again shall see,
But Thou wilt soon return.
The Authorized Version renders John 16:33,
‘But be of good cheer, I have overcome the world,’ and the Revised
Version retains the reading. But the exact and vivid sense of
alla qarseute,
‘But take-courage!’ is conveyed in the line--
Courage! your Captain cries,
Who all your toil foreknew;
Toil ye shall have, yet all despise,
I have o'ercome for you.
In the lines--
The pure in heart obtain the grace
To see without a veil His face,
there are two references to Scripture, the first to
Matt. 5:8, the second to
2 Cor. 3:18, where the
Authorized Version translates ‘With open face
beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord.’
The Greek is, however,
anakekalummenw proswpw
‘with unveiled face.’ So it is rendered by the
Revisers, and by Wesley in the Notes on the New Testament.
Obviously the proper sense of
anakekalummenoV
was in the mind of the writer of the line ‘To see
without a veil His face.’ The rendering is
specially important, because the Apostle was
referring to his own words throughout the previous
paragraph about the veil
(kalumma)
of Moses. There is a subtle illustration of the intimate knowledge of the
Greek Testament possessed by the Wesleys in the lines--
Jesus, confirm my heart's desire,
To work and speak and think for Thee,
Still let me guard the holy fire,
And still stir up Thy gift in me.
A Suggestive Word
The hymn is based upon Lev. 6:13, ‘Fire shall
be kept burning upon the altar continually: it
shall not go out.’ The text is prefaced to the hymn in the Short
Hymns on Select Passages of the Holy Scriptures. This thought of
a perpetual flame pervades the verses, and it was this which
suggested the quotation of Paul's words to Timothy,
‘Wherefore I put thee in remembrance that thou stir up the gift
of God which is in thee.’ There is no apparent connection to the
English reader, but there is to a student of the Greek Testament.
For the word rendered ‘stir up,’
anazwpurein--it
only occurs this once in the whole of the New Testament--is
a word that means (as is apparent in the very
structure of it) ‘to stir up a fire, to rekindle.’
‘Literally, blowing up the coals into a flame,’ as
Wesley remarks in the Notes on the New Testament.
Unquestionably, it was this remembrance
of the original sense of
anazwpurein
which suggested the particular form of the lines--
Still let me guard the holy fire,
And still stir up Thy gift in me.
Some Important Words
The important word
diaqhkh is
always rendered ‘covenant’ by John Wesley in the Notes on
the New Testament, despite the authority of Bengel, who prefers
testamentum. Wesley was right, for, as Farrar has said,
‘diaqhkh
always means “covenant”--except that in
Heb. 9:17 by a play upon words it has the
meaning “will.”’History of Interpretation, p. 30.
So constantly in the hymns--
Stablish with me the covenant new
And write perfection on my heart!
Then there is the obvious preference for ‘new creation’
rather than ‘new creature’ as a rendering of the Apostle's phrase
kainh ktisiV
in 2 Cor. 5:17,
and Gal. 6:18, which is evidenced by several hymns--
My Soul's new creation, a life from the dead,
The day of salvation, that lifts up my head,
And there is the constant use of ‘bears away’
for the feebler (though legitimate) ‘taketh away,’
in allusions to John 1:29--
Lamb of God, who bear'st away
All the sins of all mankind!
Behold the Lamb of God, who bears
The sins of all the world away!
Such are some of the cases in which the Wesleys anticipated later
scholarship in the exact and sensitive rendering of important phrases of
Scripture.
The Very Words of the Apostles
There are also several striking instances in which, while
no question of accurate translation
arises, the ipsissima verba of the
New Testament writers are recalled. Such is the allusion in one
of the hymns to Titus 3:4, ‘the kindness of God our Savior,
and His love toward man’ (R.V.), where the latter
phrase is a translation of one Greek word,
filanqrwpia
our word philanthropy. The original
text of the passage is remembered in the lines--
When that philanthropy divine
Into a sinner's heart doth shine,
It shows the wondrous plan,
The wisdom in a mystery
Employed by the great One and Three,
To save His favorite, man.
In Eph. 4:11,13--‘the whole armor
of God’--the two words represent one Greek word,
panoplia,
which we have in English as panoply.
The splendid word is remembered and used in the lines--
Stand then in His great might,
With all His strength endued;
But take, to arm you for the fight,
The panoply of God.
The ‘Wisdom of Solomon’
One of the books of the Apocrypha--the finest
of them all--has considerably influenced the hymns. There are numerous
allusions in the verse of the Wesleys to the language of the Wisdom of
Solomon. One of John Wesley's translations, the fine version of
Scheffler's Du unvergleichlich Gut, combines two
recollections of this book in two lines--
High throned on heaven's eternal hill,
In number, weight, and measure still,
Thou sweetly orderest all that is;
And yet Thou deign'st to come to me,
And guide my steps, that I, with Thee
Enthroned, may reign in endless bliss.
This recalls both, ‘But Thou hast ordered all
things in number, and measure, and weight’
(Wisdom 11:20), and ‘Wisdom reacheth from
one end to another, and mightily and sweetly
doth she order all things (Wisdom 8:1).
Neither reference is in the German--
Du bist die Weisheit selbst die ewiglich regieret,
Der tiefeste Verstand, der alles glücklich führet.
One of the most affecting titles given to our Lord in the hymns is from
the same source.
‘But Thou sparest all, for they are Thine, O Lord, Thou Lover of Souls’
(Wisdom 11:26). This is used again and again:
Jesu, Lover of my soul,
Let me to Thy bosom fly,
While the nearer waters roll,
While the tempest still is high.
Lover of Souls! Thou know'st to prize
What Thou hast bought so dear;
Come then, and in Thy people's eyes,
With all Thy wounds appear!
The fine rhapsody in Wisdom 3:1-4: ‘But
the souls of the righteous are in the hand of
God. . . . For though they be punished in the
sight of men, yet is their hope full of immortality,’
is remembered in the verse--
The promised land, from Pisgah's top,
I now exult to see:
My hope is full (O glorious hope!)
Of immortality.
And the noble passage in Wisdom 11:24, ‘For
Thou lovest all the things that are, and abhorrest
nothing which Thou hast made, for never
wouldest Thou have made anything if Thou
hadst hated it,’ is behind the stanza--
O may I love like Thee!
In all Thy footsteps tread!
Thou hatest all iniquity,
But nothing Thou hast made.
Luther's ‘Galatians’
The first allusion to any book other than the
Bible in the hymns of Charles Wesley is a reminiscence, often repeated,
of Luther's
Commentary on
the Epistle to the Galatians--a
reference rather to the Reformer's emphasis than to his language. There
is a manuscript of 1738 in the archives of the Brethren from the hand of
William Holland, one of the earliest of the English Moravians, in which he
writes: ‘Being providentially directed to Martin Luther's Commentary
on the Epistle to the Galatians, I carried it round to Mr. Charles
Wesley, who was then sick at Mr. Bray's, as a very precious treasure
that I had found.’ Charles Wesley writes in his
Journal, under the date Wednesday, May 17, 1738:
‘Today I first saw Luther on the Galatians, which Mr. Holland had
accidentally lit upon. We began, and found him nobly full
of faith.’ On the evening of the same day he
writes: ‘I spent some hours this evening in
private with Martin Luther, who was greatly
blessed to me, especially his conclusion of the
second chapter. I labored, waited, and prayed to feel
“Who loved me and gave Himself for me.”’
Luther spends some beautiful pages over
these words of the Apostle, ‘words full of great
and mighty comfort.’ He writes: ‘Therefore
thou shouldest so read these little words me and
for me, as to meditate well upon them, and deem
that they have much in them. 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.’
Three days after Charles Wesley had first read these words, on Sunday,
May 21, he found the peace of God. Luther's loving insistence upon
the Apostle's words is remembered and
reflected in more than one hymn written at the time.
O Filial Deity,
Accept my new-born cry!
See the travail of Thy soul,
Savior, and be satisfied:
Take me now, possess me whole,
Who for me, for me hast died!
And can it be that I should gain
An interest in the Savior's blood?
Died He for me, who caused His pain?
For me, who Him to death pursued?
Amazing love! how can it be
That Thou, my God, should'st die for me?
And throughout a hymn written exactly a year
later, in May, 1739, and entitled ‘For the Anniversary Day of
one's Conversion’:
Then with my heart I first believed,
Believed with faith divine;
Power with the Holy Ghost received
To call the Savior mine.
I felt my Lord's atoning blood
Close to my soul applied;
Me, me, He loved--the Son of God--
For me, for me, He died!
Bengel's Exposition of the Apocalypse
John Wesley's Notes on the New Testament
were largely indebted to the Gnomon of Bengel--‘that great
light of the Christian world (lately gone to his reward) Bengelius,’
as he is called in the preface. It is a striking proof of Wesley's
scholarship and shrewdness that he should have
selected as the basis of his exposition a work
which, in the language of Dr. Sanday, ‘stands
out among the exegetical literature not only of
the eighteenth century, but of all centuries, for
its masterly terseness and precision, and for
its combination of spiritual insight with the best
scholarship of the time.’ In his notes on the Apocalypse Wesley
used in addition to the Gnomon Bengel's German exposition of the book,
the Erklärte Offenbarung Johannis, und
vielmehr Jesu Christi, as it is quaintly entitled.
On Rev. 2:17 Bengel has this beautiful note:
‘A new name. So
Jacob after his victory received the new name of Israel. The word new
is very characteristic of the Revelation (ein recht
apocalyptisches Wort): a new name, a new song, a new heaven,
a new earth, new Jerusalem, all things new. Which no one knoweth
but he that receiveth it. Jesus Himself had a new name, known only
to Himself. Would'st thou know what the new name shall be?
Overcome! Before that thou askest in vain: thereafter thou wilt
soon read it, written on the white stone.’
Charles Wesley assisted in compiling the Notes,
and this comment, the last two sentences of
which were translated by the elder brother,
evidently impressed him; for eight years later, in
the Short Hymns on Select Passages of the Holy Scriptures,
he published a hymn which paraphrases Bengel's note:
Dost thou desire to know and see
What thy mysterious name shall be?
Contending for thy heavenly home,
Thy latest foe in death o'ercome;
Till then thou searchest out in vain
What only conquest can explain.
But when the Lord hath closed thine eyes,
And opened them in Paradise,
Receiving thy new name unknown,
Thou read'st it wrote on the white stone,
Wrote on thy pure humanity,
God, Three in One, and One in Three.
CHAPTER II
THE FATHERS, THE LITURGIES,
AND THE MYSTICS
upo
PneumatoV Agion feromeuoi elalhsan oi agioi Qeou anqrwpoi
Ignatius
There are many allusions in the hymns to the writings of the Fathers
of the Church. Samuel Wesley the elder, in a letter to
a young clergyman containing detailed advice as to his studies--a
letter which John Wesley published, with a preface, many years
later--declared that ‘the blessed Ignatius's Epistles can never
be enough read, or praised, or valued, next to the inspired
writings.’ And John Wesley devoted thirty pages of the first volume
of the Christian Library to the Epistles of Ignatius. It is
not surprising, therefore, that there should be several echoes of
a passage in his
Epistle to the Romans
(7:2), ‘Living I write unto you, but it is as loving to die.
For my Love has been crucified
(o emos eros
estaurwtai)
and there is left in me no fire of earthly love at
all.’ The famous phrase becomes the refrain of the hymn,
‘O Love Divine, what hast thou done?’--
The immortal God for me hath died:
My Lord, my Love is crucified--
and it is recalled in several other hymns. It
had been previously used in an old German
hymn which John Wesley is not likely to have
seen, and it is quoted in one of the Spiritual
Songs of John Mason, which was certainly known to both brothers:
My Lord, my Love is crucified,
He all the Pains did bear;
But in the Sweetness of His Rest,
He makes His Servants share.
Tertullian
Another hymn contains an echo of Tertullian--
Though earth and hell the word gainsay
The Word of God can never fail;
The Lamb shall take my sins away;
'Tis certain, though impossible;
The thing impossible shall be,
All things are possible to me.
The passage is in Tertullian's treatise De Carne
Christi. He is arguing against Marcion, whose
contention was that the humiliation implied in the fact of the Incarnation
was unworthy of God. Tertullian answers this in a passage splendidly
paradoxical and profoundly spiritual: ‘Spare the whole world's
one only hope, thou
who art destroying the indispensable dishonor of our faith. Whatever is
unworthy of God is of gain to me. . . . The Son of God is born; we are
not ashamed, because we ought to be ashamed. And the Son of God died;
it is perfectly credible, because it is absurd. And being buried He rose
again; it is certain, because it is impossible.’
(Natus est Dei Filius; non pudet quia pudendum est; et mortuus est
Dei Filius; prorsus credibile est quia ineptum est; et sepultus
resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile.) The hymn, however,
merely quotes the famous phrase that is known to all the world.
A passage in Tertullian's Apology (c. 39), ‘Look
ye, say they, how these Christians seem to love
one another!’ is also recalled in a hymn which is
probably by John Wesley--
In them let all mankind behold
How Christians lived in days of old
Mighty their envious foes to move,
A proverb of reproach--and love.
Here it is hardly probable that this is a direct reference to the
passage, for John Wesley wrote to his mother from Marienborn while on his
journey to Herrnhut, quoting the words and attributing them to Julian
the Apostate: ‘Eighty-eight of them [the Moravians] praise
God with one heart and one mouth at Marienborn;
another little company at Runnesburg,
an hour off; another at Budingen, an hour from
thence; and yet another at Frankfort. I now
understand those words of poor Julian, “See
how these Christians love one another!”’ The
phrase is quoted as proverbial in the introduction
to Arndt's True Christianity, and in at least
one other of the works included in the Christian Library.
‘The Christians to the Lions!’
Another passage in the Apology is referred to
in more than one hymn: ‘If Tiber overflows, and
Nile does not; if heaven stands still and withholds its rain, and
the earth quakes; if famine or pestilence take their marches
through the country, the word is, Away with
these Christians to the lions!’ (c. 40.)
‘Away with them,’ the world exclaim,
‘The Christians to the lions cast!’
The stream is troubled by the lamb,
And must be so, while time shall last.
The Lamb, they say, disturbs the stream,
The world confounded is by them
Who its confusions end:
Yet still, ‘Away with them,’ they cry,
‘The Christians burn or crucify,
Or to the lions send!’
Aesop
It is curious that both these hymns which have
the allusion to Tertullian's words should also contain a reference to
one of Aesop's fables, the story of the wolf who complained that the
stream of which he was drinking was disturbed by a lamb
farther down--a mere pretext for devouring the alleged disturber.
Jerome
It has been suggested that the lines--
To damp our earthly joys,
To increase our gracious fears,
For ever let the Archangel's voice
Be sounding in our ears:
The solemn midnight cry,
Ye dead, the Judge is come.
Arise, and meet Him in the sky,
And meet your instant doom!
--recall a passage of Jerome: ‘Quoties diem
ilium considero, toto corpore contremisco, sive
enim comedo, sive bibo, sive aliquid aliud facio,
semper videtur illa tuba terribilis sonare in
auribus meis, Surgite, mortui, venite ad judicum.’
(In xvii. Johannis.) Charles Wesley may very
probably have met with the words, apart from
any patristic reading, for they are quoted in the
Latin in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and in
English by Chaucer in the Persones Tale: ‘For
as Seint Jerome sayth: at every time that me
remembreth of the day of dome, I quake: for
whan I ete or drinke, or do what so I do, ever
semeth me that the trompe sowneth in min eres:
riseth ye up that ben ded, and cometh to the
jugement.’
In John Austin's Offices (1668) (partly
republished in the Christian Library) there is a
hymn of which one verse runs--
O quicken, Lord, our Faith,
Of these great Joys and Fears;
And make the last Day's Trumpet be
Still sounding in our Ears.
But Charles Wesley's stanza is more than an echo of this: it
carries the allusion to Jerome's language farther than Austin's
lines do, to
Surgite, mortui, venite ad judicum.
Eusebius
The lines in one of the hymns on heaven--
A brother dead to God,
By sin alas! undone,
--recall the famous story of St. John and the robber, told by
Eusebius in the Ecclesiastical History (iii. 23)--a book which
John Wesley records reading for the second time in November, 1741.
Inquiring of a bishop in the neighborhood of Ephesus as to the welfare
of a young man whom he had previously committed to the bishop's
special charge, the Apostle received the answer, ‘He is dead.’
Being further questioned, the bishop said, ‘He is dead to God,
for alas! he is become a villain, and is fled to the mountains to be a
robber.’ Whereupon the Apostle hastened to the mountain fastnesses,
and never rested until he had brought back the young man in penitence,
and restored him to the Church. (It may be added that the story is told
in Wesley's abridgement of Cave's Primitive Christianity in the
Christian Library.)
Augustine
When we reach Augustine we are on surer ground. The Wesleys evidently
knew the Confessions well. It was one of the highly interesting
list of books which had to be provided (by the direction of an early
Conference) for the use of Wesley and the preachers at the three centers
of London, Bristol, and Newcastle. Wesley once prepared for the press an
edition of it in the original Latin, probably intended for the scholars
of Kingswood School.
In 1745 Wesley maintained a long correspondence with
‘Mr John Smith’--supposed to be the nom de guerre
of Dr. Secker, Bishop of Oxford. In one of his letters Wesley quoted,
as an instance of what he meant by his doctrine of assurance, a whole
chapter of the Confessions, ‘which,’ he writes,
‘I was reading yesterday.’ It is the great passage which ends
with the words, ‘And Thou criedst to me from afar, Yea, verily, I am
that I am. And I heard, as the heart heareth, nor had I room to doubt,
and I should sooner doubt that I live, than that Truth is not’
(vii. 10).
‘Confessions’
This great spiritual classic has left considerable traces in the
hymns of both brothers. A passage in the first book recalls some of
Charles Wesley's most impassioned lines. Augustine wrote: ‘Hide not
Thy face from me. Let me die (that I die not) that I may see Thy
face!’ (Moriar ne moriar, ut cam videam)
(i. 5). There is a very similar passage
in the Soliloquies: ‘But why dost thou hide Thy face? Haply
Thou wilt say, “No man can see Me and live.” Ah, Lord, let me die,
that I may see Thee; let me see Thee, that I may die.’
(Sed cur faciem tuam abscondis? Forte dicis non
videbit me homo et vivet’ (Ex. 33:20).
Eia, Domine, moriar ut te videam. Videam,
ut hic moriar) (Solil. c. i.). This became
a favorite thought with the poet of Methodism, and inspired
many stanzas such as:
I cannot see Thy face and live!
Then let me see Thy face, and die!
Now, Lord, my gasping spirit receive!
Give me on eagles' wings to fly;
With eagles' eyes on Thee to gaze,
And plunge into the glorious blaze.
And if there were any doubt about the connection between such lines
as these and the words of the great African Father, it would be dispelled
by the fact that another hymn which echoes the thought--
Live only Christ in me, not I;
O let me see Thy face, and die!
--was headed, when published in the Hymns
and Sacred Poems of 1742, ‘Moriar ut te videam!’
‘Let me die that I may see Thee! Here the phrase is evidently quoted
from the Soliloquies.
Another reminiscence of the Confessions occurs in John Wesley's
translation of Tersteegen's
great hymn,
'Thou hidden love of God, whose height.'
The lines--
My heart is pained, nor can it be
At rest, till it finds rest in Thee--
deliberately recall the famous passage: ‘Thou dost arouse us to
delight in praising Thee; for Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our
heart is restless, until it find rest in Thee!’ (i. 1). Here
the allusion is John Wesley's own; there is nothing of it in
Tersteegen's German, the last lines of which are--
Ich bin nicht stille, wie ich soll
Ich fühles ist dem Geist nicht wohl,
Weil er in dir nicht stehet.
There is a further reminiscence of Augustine in another of John
Wesley's translations from the German. The lines--
Ah! why did I so late Thee know,
Thee, lovelier than the sons of men!
--recall the classic passage: ‘Too late I loved
Thee, Beauty so old and yet so new, too late
I loved Thee!’ (x. 27). Here it is Scheffler
himself who is responsible for the allusion to
Augustine, for it is clearer in the German than in
the English: ‘Ach, dass ich dich so spät erkennet,
Du hochgelobte Schönheit du!’
A phrase in one verse of John Wesley's translation of
Scheffler's Du unvergleichlich Gut has
been colored by the translator's remembrance
of the same passage in Augustine. Angelus wrote
‘Du bist die Schönheit selbst, Du kannst nichts
Schönres finden! Es kann dich nichts als nur
Dein eigne Schönheit binden.’ But die Schonheit
selbst becomes in Wesley's translation, with a
memory of Augustine's pulchritudo antiqua:
Primeval Beauty! in Thy sight,
The first-born, fairest sons of light
See all their brightest glories fade!
In the hymn ‘For an Unconverted Child’ the lines occur:
Regard my endless griefs and fears
Nor let the Son of all these tears
Be finally undone.
Monica and the Bishop
This is an unmistakable allusion to the story told by Augustine in the
Confessions (iii. 12)
about his mother and the Bishop. Monica besought the Bishop to
see her son, and strive to bring him from the error of his ways.
The Bishop replied that it was best to leave him
alone, and pray for him. ‘When she would not
be satisfied, but urged him more, with entreaties
and many tears, that he would see me, and discourse
with me; he, a little displeased at her
importunity, saith, “Go thy ways, and God be
with thee: it is not possible that the son of these
tears should perish.” Which answer she took (as
she often mentioned in her conversations with
me) as if it had been a voice from heaven.
And there is at least one other of Augustine's
wonderful phrases; in the Confessions that influenced
the verse of Charles Wesley. It is a part
of a great supplication: ‘Narrow is the home
of my soul; enlarge it, that Thou mayest enter
in. It is ruinous; do Thou repair it, (i. 5).
This is reflected in the lines--
Thou know'st the way to bring me back,
My fallen spirit to restore
O for Thy truth and mercy's sake,
Forgive, and bid me sin no more;
The ruins of my soul repair,
And make my heart a house of prayer.
‘Soliloquies’
There are other passages in the Soliloquies which seem to have
influenced the hymns.
‘Aegrotus sum, ad medicum clamo: caecus sum, ad lucem
propero: mortuus sum, ad vitam suspiro. Tu es medicus, tu lux, tu vita.
Jesu Nazarene, miserere mei’ (c. ii.). It is difficult to
read this without thinking that some remembrance of it was in Charles
Wesley's mind when he wrote--
Jesu, my all in all Thou art;
My rest in toil, my ease in pain,
The medicine of my broken heart,
In war my peace, in loss my gain,
My smile beneath the tyrant's frown,
In shame my glory and my crown:
In want my plentiful supply,
In weakness my almighty power,
In bonds my perfect liberty,
My light in Satan's darkest hour,
In grid my joy unspeakable,
My life in death, my heaven in hell.
And here is another characteristic passage:
‘Quoniam Si quid boni est parvum vel magnum,
donum tuum est, et nostrum non est nisi malum’
(c. xv.). The thought seems to be reproduced in the lines--
All power is Thine in earth and heaven,
All fullness dwells in Thee alone;
Whate'er I have was freely given,
Nothing but sin I call my own.
And, once more, Augustine's words: ‘Et video
nunc quia donum tuum est’ (c. xv.) seem to be
reflected in John Wesley's translation of Scheffler's
Ich will dich tiebe, meine Stärke
(there is an unquestioned allusion to Augustine, in the preceding
verse, which we have already mentioned):
And now if more at length I see,
'Tis through Thy light, and comes from Thee.
Exposition of St. John's Gospel
Augustine's fine comment upon our Lord's first
miracle (In Joan. Ev. Tract. viii. I) is quoted in
another hymn. ‘For He who made wine on that day at the marriage
feast, in those six water-pots, which He commanded to be
filled with water, the selfsame does this every
year in vines... But we do not wonder at the
latter, because it happens every year: it has lost
its marvellousness by its constant recurrence.’
Charles Wesley wrote, in a hymn upon John 2:7:
When wine they want, the Almighty Lord
Water instead of wine demands:
He both created by His word,
Nothing His sovereign will withstands:
And every year in every vine
He changes water into wine.
In one of the hymns there is a singular idea
as to the intercourse of heaven:
Where glorified spirits by sight
Converse in their holy abode.
This, it has been suggested, may be derived from
a passage in Hudibras (the Heroical Epistle)--a strange
source!--
For what can earth produce, but love,
To represent the joys above?
Or who but lovers can converse,
Like angels, by the eye-discourse?
Plotinus
But the notion really comes from Plotinus, and it is quite likely
that Charles Wesley may have met with it there. The passage is in the
fifth Ennead (viii. 4), ‘They speak not one with
the other; but, as we understand many things by
the eyes only, so does soul read soul in heaven,
where the spiritual body is pure, and nothing is
hidden, and nothing feigned.
There are two rather recondite allusions in a stanza of one of the
hymns on the Passion:
Dies the glorious Cause of all,
The true eternal Pan,
Falls to raise us from our fall,
To ransom sinful man:
Well may Sol withdraw his light,
With the Sufferer sympathize,
Leave the world in sudden night,
While his Creator dies!
Plutarch
The first reference is to the story recorded by
Plutarch (De Oraculorum Delectu) that in the reign
of Tiberius a pilot named Thamus was steering his ship round the
coast of Epirus, when he heard voices proclaiming, ‘Thamus, Thamus,
great Pan is dead!’Cf. Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar
(May), and Gloss.
(Pan o megas
teqnhken.)
Dionysius the Areopagite
The other allusion is fainter. There is a legend that Dionysius the
Areopagite, perceiving a disturbance in nature at the time of the
Crucifixion, said, H to Qeion
pascei, h tw pasconti sumpascei,
Cf. Brev. Rom., Oct. 9 (Lectio 4),
and Hooker, Eccl. Pol. I. iii. 4. ‘Either the
Divinity suffers, or sympathizes with the sufferer!’ It would
seem that a recollection of this has colored the line, ‘Well
may Sol withdraw his light, With the Sufferer sympathize.’
The Hymns and the Ecclesiastical Year
It is a striking fact that Methodism has supplied English Christendom
with hymns for all the great festivals of the ecclesiastical year. At
Christmas
‘Hark! the herald angels sing!’
is heard in every land
where the English language is spoken. It is the same at Easter with
‘Christ the Lord is risen today!’
and much the same on Ascension Day with
‘Hail the day that sees Him rise,’
and on Whit-Sunday with
‘Granted is the Savior's prayer.’
Some time ago an interesting suggestion was made by an Anglican hymnologist
Moorsom, Historical Companion to Hymns Ancient and Modern,
pp. 83, 64. with regard to two of these hymns. It was suggested that
‘Hark! the herald angels sing!’ was possibly
inspired by a hymn from the Menaion of the Greek Church,
cristos gennatai
doxasate. This
forms a part of the Canon for Christmas Day.
It was written by St. Cosmas, the foster-brother
of St. John Damascene, who lived in the first
half of the eighth century. Unhappily, there is
not a great deal that can be urged in support of
this attractive suggestion. There is little likeness
between the Greek and the English, not
more than we might expect to find between any
two hymns for the Nativity, and hardly as much
as exists, for example, between Wesley's English
and the Latin of Peter the Venerable in the
hymn Coelum gaude terra plaude.
It was also suggested by the same writer that Charles Wesley may have
had in mind, when writing
‘Hail the day that sees Him rise,’
the hymn of Fortunatus (or a fourteenth-century imitator of his),
Salve
festa dies toto venerabilis aevo, Qua Deus ad coelos scandit et astra
tenet. Here, again, there is very little
resemblance--none whatever, in fact, except the initial phrase.
Mediaeval Hymns
But these suggestions, baseless as they seem to be, are enough to
raise in one's mind the whole question of a possible indebtedness, on
the part of the Wesleys, to the great hymns of the Middle Ages. At
first sight, such a relation does not seem at all likely. In the eighteenth
century the whole of the mediaeval hymnody was almost a terra incognita.
It was only with the rise of romanticism in literature, at the end
of that century, that these hymns began to come to their own. One may
say that Scott's use of Thomas of Celano's great dirge (in which he
followed Goethe) was almost the beginning of modern interest in
mediaeval hymns. And it was nearly half a century later when these hymns
began to be recovered for the use of the English Churches by
Dr. Neale,
and other High Anglican and Catholic scholars. In the age of the Wesleys
there was very little knowledge in England of the Latin hymns of the
Middle Ages, and still less of the Greek hymns, found in the
service-books of the Eastern Church. On the face of it,
therefore, these hymns are not likely to have been known to the brothers.
On the other hand, there are some small but significant facts. John
Wesley translated a German hymn which itself was a translation from the
Latin.
‘Jesu, Thy soul renew my own’
is a version of Scheffler's
Die Seele Christi heil'ge mich,
which again was a version of the mediaeval
Anima Christi sanctifica me.
These lines are entitled in the Roman Breviary ‘The Aspirations
of St. Ignatius to the Most Holy Redeemer,’ but
the ascription to the founder of the Society of
Jesus is an error. The lines probably date from
the fourteenth century. It is surely possible
that John Wesley was aware of the Latin original.
St. Thomas Aquinas
Again, when Charles Wesley was in Dublin in
1747 he wrote in his Journal: ‘I spoke with great
freedom to the poor Papists, urging them to repentance and
the love of Christ, from the authority of their own Kempis, and
their own Liturgy.’ This can only mean that he was a student
of the Breviary--a very suggestive fact. Doubtless it was there
that he read the splendid story of the ecstasy of St. Thomas
Aquinas, which impressed him so much, and left its mark upon more
than one hymn. The incident is told in one of the lessons for the
saint's festival.Brev. Rom., Mar. 7 (Lectio 5).
As St. Thomas prayed, he heard the
Savior's voice saying, ‘Thou hast written well of Me; what reward wouldst
thou have?’ and he exclaimed in answer, ‘Thyself, Lord, nothing
but Thyself!’ This is recalled unmistakably in such lines as--
Give me Thyself from every boast,
From every wish set free,
Let all I have in Thee be lost,
But give Thyself to me!
and--
Nothing beside my God I want,
Nothing in earth or heaven!
And if Charles Wesley knew the Breviary, he must have known the Latin hymns
in it. Accordingly, we are not surprised to find that the language of the
great hymn of St. Thomas Aquinas, Adoro te devote, has apparently
colored several of our hymns.
A phrase in the first line, latens Deitas, appears in a
hymn for the Nativity:
He laid His glory by
He wrapped Him in our clay,
Unmarked by human eye,
The latent Godhead lay.
Then, later in the hymn, the Angelic Doctor wrote:
Me immundum myinda tuo sanguine,
Cujus una stilla salvum facere
Totum mundum quit ab omni scelere,
--lines which have been translated very literally thus:
Unclean I am, but cleanse me in Thy blood!
Of which a single drop, for sinners spilt,
Can purge the entire world of all its guilt.
This mystical notion of the efficacy of a single drop of the
Redeemer's blood became a favorite thought with Charles Wesley:
By all Thou hast done for my sake,
One drop of Thy blood I implore,
Now, now let it touch me, and make
The sinner a sinner no more!
And again:
Sprinkle it, Jesus, on my heart!
One drop of Thine all-cleansing blood
Shall make my sinfulness depart,
And fill me with the life of God!
At least a dozen other examples might be given of the presence of
this thought in our hymns. It should be said, in fairness, that the thought
occurs in some of the older English poets, notably Donne, who has it more
than once:
Now Thou art lifted up, draw me to Thee,
And at Thy death, giving such liberal dole,
Moist with one drop of Thy blood my dry soul.
But Donne undoubtedly got it from St. Thomas Aquinas, and so may
Charles Wesley, as we have seen. And since he knew the Latin hymns in the
Breviary, he may very well have known other mediaeval hymns not found
there.
Adam of St. Victor
John Wesley certainly did know the old Nativity hymns,
Puer natus in Bethlehem, and
In dulci jubilo,
for they are found, with some modern Latin hymns written by Johann
Wilhelm Petersen (1649-1727), in Freylinghausen's Gesangbuch.
And the brothers may have encountered in their
reading other Latin hymns of the Middle Ages.
At any rate here is another extraordinary parallel. In a hymn by
Adam of St. Victor there is the striking phrase, applied to the Holy Spirit:
Tu qui dator es et donum, ‘Thou
who Giver art and Gift’; and in another hymn by
the same writer there is a variation of the same phrase,
Tu donum, tu donator, ‘Thou
the Gift, Thou the Giver.’
This recurs constantly in Charles Wesley's hymns for Whit-Sunday:
Life Divine in us renew,
Thou the Gift and Giver too.
For Thee our hearts we lift,
And wait the heavenly Gift
Giver, Lord of life Divine
To our dying souls appear.
Grant the grace for which we pine,
Give Thyself, the Comforter.
I come athirst and faint
Thy Spirit to receive,
Give me the Gift for which I pant,
Thyself the Giver give.
The English Liturgy
There are in the hymns many reminiscences of the English Liturgy, as we
should expect.
Meet and right it is to sing,
In every time and place,
Glory to our heavenly king,
The God of truth and grace,
is a paraphrase of the Preface and the Sanctus
of the Communion Office: ‘It is very meet,
right, and our bounden duty . . . Therefore with
angels and archangels . . .’
Similarly--
Glory be to God on high,
God, whose glory fills the sky,
is a paraphrase of the Gloria in Excelsis of the
Communion Office: ‘Glory be to God on high,
and on earth peace, good will toward men. We
praise Thee, we bless Thee, we worship Thee. . . .’
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
Thy Godhead we adore,
is a poetical version of the Gloria Patri.
The language of the Litany is paraphrased in the stanza--
Thou loving, all-atoning Lamb,
Thee, by Thy painful agony,
Thy bloody sweat, Thy grief and shame,
Thy Cross and passion on the tree,
Thy precious Death and Life, I pray
Take all, take all my sins away!
And there are numerous other examples of an influence which, in the
case of devout Churchmen like the Wesleys, was inevitable.
Mysticism in the Hymns
There is a strain of essential mysticism in the hymns of the Wesleys.
The recognition of this fact would correct a frequent mis-judgement. Leslie
Stephen wrote ‘Mysticism seemed to John Wesley to be simply folly.
His feet were on the solid earth, and he preferred the plain light of day
to the glooms and glories loved by more imaginative natures.’
History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. ii.
xii., p. 87.
Even so learned and so candid a writer as Dr. Gwatkin thinks that
Wesley's teaching was ‘as clear and full of common sense as Matthew
Tindal's Deism, and as characteristically wanting in a sense of mystery.’
The Knowledge of God, vol. ii., p. 245.
Now it is perfectly true that Wesley was a man of his century, that he
had a precise and logical intellect, and that he hated vagueness. It is
also true that he said hard things, again and again, about ‘the mystic
divines,’ driven thereto by the disastrous effects of an errant Quietism
among the Societies. But it should be remembered that there is much on
the other side.
Some of the finest of John Wesley's translations from the German
are versions of the profoundly mystical hymns of Tersteegen and
Scheffler. And then there is the unmistakable accent of mysticism in
much of Charles Wesley's verse. The latest French writer on Methodism,
Dr. Augustin Leger, has remarked upon this
‘Qui veut aimer Dieu, doit aimer toutes choses
en Dieu seul : Un en tous, et tous en Un, formule que
répéteront à satiété les vers des Wesley.’
La Jeunesse de Wesley, p. 191.
Surely they were mystics who wrote:
O sovereign Love to Thee I cry!
Give me Thyself, or else I die!
Save me from death; from hell set free:
Death, hell, are but the want of Thee,
and--
Eager for Thee I ask and pant,
So strong the principle divine,
Carries me out with sweet constraint,
Till all my hallowed soul is Thine;
Plunged in the Godhead's deepest sea,
And lost in Thy immensity!
and--
Nothing else in earth or skies,
In time, or in eternity:
Heaven itself could not suffice:
I seek not Thine, but Thee.
Then John Wesley was early and deeply imbued with mystical teaching.
He read the Theologia Germanica and some of the writings of
Tauler in early life, and at Oxford was a professed
disciple of William Law. He greatly admired
the writings of the Cambridge Platonists (a distinction in itself for
one who lived in the eighteenth century) and printed some of John
Smith's Sermons in the Christian Library. In the same collection
he issued an abridgement of the Guida Spirituale of Molinos, the
Spanish mystic. There does not appear to have been
any other edition in English between 1699 and 1775.
He was specially interested in two mystics of the preceding century,
and refers to their life and doctrine again and again--Antoinette Bourignon
and Jeanne de la Mothe Guyon.
Antoinette Bourignon
He read Antoinette Bourignon's Treatise of Solid Virtue and
Light of the World in April 1736, while in Georgia.
He included the former work in the Christian Library in 1754, and
many years before he had published translations of some of the author's
devotional verse. Scattered through her voluminous works are five hymns,
two of which were translated and included in the Hymns and Sacred
Poems of 1739, Venez, Jesus, mon salutaire,
‘Come, Savior Jesus, from above,’
and Adieu, Monde, vray pipeur, ‘World, adieu, thou real
cheat!’
Byrom or Wesley?
The identity of the translator is a
pretty problem in criticism. The hymns are claimed for Dr. Byrom, on the
strength of two facts. First, they are included in his Miscellaneous
Poems (1773). But, as these were
collected and published ten years after his death,
this is not absolutely conclusive evidence. Byrom
might have copied out the verses because they interested him by their
mysticism, and after his death they might thus have been easily mistaken
for his own. (Yet Wesley read the Miscellaneous
Poems when they appeared in 1773, and made no
remark on the presence of these hymns.) In the
second place, there is a letter of Byrom's to
Charles Wesley dated March 3, 1738: ‘As your
brother has brought so many hymns translated
from the French, you will have a sufficient number, and no occasion
to increase them by the small addition of Mademoiselle Bourignon's
two little pieces. I desire you to favor
my present weakness, if I judge wrong, and not
to publish them.’ This seems to us to suggest
unmistakably Byrom's authorship of the translations. There remains
the difficulty that no other translations from the French are known to
have been in John Wesley's possession. Is it
possible that this was a slip of Byrom's for ‘many
hymns translated from the German,’ of which he
had previously heard? The sense would then be,
‘since he has so many translated hymns, he will
need no more.’ Byrom did not himself begin to
learn German until several years after this, which
would make the mistake as to the language more
conceivable. But, on the other side of the
question, there is the fact that Byrom wrote to
his son on April 26, 1739, referring to the Hymns
and Sacred Poems published in that year by the
Wesleys in these terms: ‘They have together
printed a book of hymns, amongst which they
have inserted two of M. Bourignon's, one of
which they call “A Farewell to the World,” and
the other “Renouncing all for Christ” (Come,
Savior Jesus), I think, from the French.’
The style of the two hymns is unquestionably
more like that of John Wesley than like that of
Byrom. If the versions were by Byrom, they
were certainly somewhat altered by Wesley.
‘Where the Christians live!’
An incident related in Antoinette Bourignon's autobiography has
influenced the language of one hymn. When the Flemish Quietist was a
child, struck by the unlikeness of the life around her to what she read
of in the Gospels, she said to her parents, ‘Where are the Christians?
Let us go to the country where the Christians live!’
This is remembered in a hymn on ‘Primitive Christianity’:
Ye different sects, who all declare
Lo! here is Christ! or ‘Christ is there!’
Your stronger proofs divinely give,
And show me where the Christians live!
When John Wesley was on his way to Herrnhut in July 1738 he recorded
in his Journal: ‘In the afternoon we came to Weymar, where we had
more difficulty to get through the city than is
usual, even in Germany; being not only detained a considerable time at
the gate, but also carried before I know not what great man (I believe the
Duke) in the Square; who after many other questions, asked what we were
going so far as Herrnhut for: I answered, “To see the place where the
Christians live.” He looked hard, and let us go.’
John Wesley and Frederick the Great
Moore, in his Life of Wesley (i. 329), says that
the ‘great man’ was ‘Frederick, afterwards King
of Prussia, then Prince Royal, as Mr. Wesley was
informed.’ It would be attractive to think of an
encounter between two men so famous, and so
different, as Frederick the Great and John Wesley; but unfortunately
there is little to warrant us in such a fancy. Henry Moore was the
intimate friend of Wesley, as well as his biographer, and it is not
easy to understand how he could be mistaken in
the matter, but there is no hint of ‘the great
man’ being Frederick in the Journal, either in
the passage quoted, or in several later passages
which refer unflatteringly to the great King of
Prussia. Moreover, it is difficult to understand
how he could be doing the work of a city magistrate at Weimar,
which was not in Prussian occupation, as Halle was. And finally, Frederick
would appear to have been in another part of
the country altogether at that time, spending
most of July and August in that year upon
a visit to the Duchy of Cleves and Loo in Holland.
Madam Guyon
In 1776 John Wesley published An Extract
of the Life of Madame Guion. He had
long been a critical student of her life and writings.
In 1742 he records in his Journal that he read Madam Guyon's
Les Torrents Spirituelles. It would seem probable that Charles
Wesley read it a few years later, for there appear to be traces of
it in some hymns published in the Hymns and Sacred Poems of 1749.
The imagery of the following passages runs through the whole of the
Spiritual Torrents. ‘All have a loving impatience
to purify themselves, and to adopt the necessary
ways and means of returning to their source and
origin, like rivers, which after leaving their source,
flow on continuously, in order to precipitate
themselves into the sea.’ . . . ‘Finally . . they
reach the sea, where they are lost to be found
no more . . . it is the sea, and yet it is the river,
because the river, being lost in the sea, has
become one with it.’
This thought is reflected in the lines--
Wherefore to Thee I all resign:
Being Thou art, and love, and power;
Thy only will be done, not mine!
Thee, Lord, let earth and heaven adore!
Flow back the rivers to the sea,
And let our all be lost in Thee!
and in the lines--
Our love from earthly dross refine:
Holy, angelical, divine,
Thee its great Author let it show,
And back to the pure Fountain flow,
A drop of that unbounded sea,
O Lord, resorb it into Thee!
Another favorite image appears in this passage: ‘Therefore
the heart of man is perpetually in motion, and can find no rest until
it returns to its origin and center, which is God: like fire, which,
being removed from its sphere, is in continual agitation, and does not
rest till it has returned to it.’ This is reflected in another stanza
of the last hymn quoted:
A spark of That ethereal fire,
Still let it to its Source aspire:
To Thee in every wish return,
Intensely for Thy glory burn,
While all our souls fly up to Thee,
And blaze through all eternity!
William Law
William Law was a mystic if there ever was one, and he was the early
master of both brothers. They parted company with him,
it is true, but he had an abiding influence upon them. As late as
1768, John Wesley published a volume of extracts
from Law's later writings. Many illustrations of
Law's influence might be given. There are some
favorite ideas of Charles Wesley's which appear
in the hymns again and again. Such is the
thought that the regenerate soul is a reflection
of the Holy Trinity:
O that we now, in love renewed,
Might blameless in Thy sight appear
Wake me in Thy similitude,
Stamped with the Triune character
Flesh, spirit, soul, to Thee resign,
And live and die entirely Thine!
And when we rise, in love renewed,
Our souls resemble Thee,
An image of of the Triune God
To all eternity.
Made like the first happy pair,
Let us here Thy nature share,
Holy, pure, and perfect be,
Transcripts of the Trinity.
. . . a sinless saint
In perfect love renewed;
A mirror of the Deity,
A transcript of the One in Three,
A temple filled with God!
Transcripts of the Trinity
Charles Wesley once commented upon these last lines,
which had been criticized. In a letter to his wife he wrote--
You and the other objectors do not understand those
lines. A transcript of the One in Three is the definition
of man unfallen, and of man restored to the divine image.
The expression is Mr. Law's, not mine; who proves a
trinity throughout all nature.
The thought recurs perpetually in the writings of William Law.
Cf. St. Augustine De Civ. Dei, xi. 26. In
An Appeal to all who doubt the Truths of the Gospel, he writes--
How could the Holy Trinity be an object of Man's
worship and adoration, if the Holy Trinity had not produced itself in
Man? . . . Our redemption consists in
nothing else but in the Bringing Forth this new Birth in
us . . . that, being thus born again in the Likeness of the
Holy Trinity, we may be capable of its threefold Blessing
and Happiness.
In Christian Regeneration he writes--
We have before shown, that Man was created a living Image of
the Holy Trinity in Unity, that the Divine Birth
arose in him, and that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost saw
themselves in him, in a creaturely Manner. . . . There
appears a surprising Agreeableness and Fitness, in the Means of our
Redemption, namely, that we could only be saved by the eternal Son of God;
that He could only save us by taking our Nature upon Him, and so uniting it
with Him, that His Life, or Birth, might again arise
in us, as at the first, and so we become again a perfect living image
of the Holy Trinity.
The notion also occurs in Byrom's writings. In An Epistle to a
Gentleman of the Temple there are the lines describing Adam--
Formed in the likeness of the sacred Three,
He stood immortal, powerful, and free;
Image of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
The destined sire of a new heavenly host.
Jacob Böhme
Byrom and Law had ploughed with the same heifer. They got the thought
from Jacob Böhme, who wrote--
So near thee, indeed, is God, that the birth of the
Holy Trinity takes place in thy heart also, and there all Three
Persons are born, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (Aurora, c. x., 58)
CHAPTER III
THE POETS
ws
kai tines twn kaq umas poihtwn eirhkasi ...
There are occasional reminiscences of the Latin poets in the hymns,
naturally, for the Wesleys were good classical scholars. Charles Wesley
once defended himself against the abuse of that virago, his brother's
wife, by reciting Virgil at the top of his voice. Judging by their
quotations, Virgil was his favorite Latin poet, as Horace was his
brother John's.
Virgil
The most distinct allusion to Virgil that we have traced is in a hymn
which paraphrases a famous passage in the sixth book of the Aeneid
(724-729):
Principio caelum ac terras camposque liquentis
Lucentemque globum Lunae Titaniaque astra
Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus
Mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet.
Inde hominum pecudumque genus vitaeque volantum
Et quae marmoreo fert monstra sub aequore pontus.
It is evident that this has colored the thought of some of the following
lines:
That all-informing breath Thou art
Who dost continued life impart,
And bid'st the world persist to be
Garnished by Thee yon azure sky
And all those beauteous orbs on high
Depend in golden chains from Thee.
Thou art the Uuiversal Soul,
The plastic power that fills the whole,
And governs earth, air, sea, and sky;
The creatures all Thy breath receive,
And who by Thy inspiring live,
Without Thy inspiration die.
Spirit immense, eternal Mind,
That on the souls of lost mankind
Dost with benignest influence move,
Pleased to restore the ruined race,
And new-create a world of grace
In all the image of Thy love!
Horace
The most striking allusion to Horace is in the hymn,
‘Stand the omnipotent decree!’--which,
while a paraphrase of a passage in Young's
Night Thoughts, is yet influenced by the ode, ‘Justum
et tenacem propositi virum’--
Si fractus illabitur orbis,
Inpavidum ferient ruinae. (iii. 3.)
Let this earth dissolve and blend
In death the wicked and the just,
Let those ponderous orbs descend
And grind us into dust.
Rests secure the righteous man!
The English poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have
influenced the hymns very considerably, especially Milton, George Herbert,
Dryden, Prior, and Young.
Milton
The influence of Milton is visible everywhere in the hymns. The great
Puritan poet is the source of many of their striking phrases, and his
influence upon the poetic style of the Wesleys is greater, perhaps,
than that of any other writer. John Wesley apparently knew a great part of
Paradise Lost by heart. At Kingswood, in 1750, he ‘selected passages
of Milton for the eldest children to transcribe and repeat weekly.’
Later--in 1763--he published An Extract from Milton's Paradise Lost,
and in the Preface declared that ‘Of all the poems which have hitherto
appeared in the world, in whatever age or nation, the
preference has generally been given by impartial
judges to Milton's Paradise Lost.’
‘Samson Agonistos’
One or two passages in which the hymns reflect the language of the
great poet are well known. Thus:
O dark, dark, dark, I still must say
Amid the blaze of gospel day,
is a reminiscence of the wonderful plaint of the blinded giant in
Samson Agonistes:
Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half,
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse,
Without all hope of day!
And the fine stanza:
With Thee conversing, I forget
All time, and toil, and care:
Labor is rest, and pain is sweet,
If Thou, my God, art here,
deliberately recalls the words of Eve to Adam:
With thee conversing, I forget all time,
An seasons and their change; all please alike.
‘Paradise Lost’
There are many other examples, however, less obvious than these, or at any
rate less noticed, which are yet unmistakable allusions to Milton. For
instance:
Thine arm hath safely brought us
A way no more expected
Than when Thy sheep passed through the deep
By crystal walls protected,
reminds us of the lines:
As on dry land, between two crystal walls,
Awed by the rod of Moses so to stand,
Divided till his rescued gain their shore.
The quoted phrase, by the way, occurs a second time in
Paradise Lost. The first apostrophe in
O unexampled Love!
O all-redeeming Grace!
How swiftly didst Thou move
To save a fallen race! ...
is from the same source:
. . .O unexampled Love!
Love nowhere to be found less than divine!
In the lines:
But above all lay hold
On faith's victorious shield,
Armed with that adamant and gold
Be sure to win the field,
the poet of Methodism has borrowed his vivid phrase from the
description of the arch-fiend:
Satan, with vast and haughty strides advanced,
Came towering, armed in adamant and gold.
In the verse:
With glorious clonds encompassed round,
Whom angels dimly see,
Will the Unsearchable be found,
or God appear to me?
there is a remembrance of the address to the Most High put into the
mouths of our first parents in the fifth book of the poem:
Unspeakable! Who sitt'st above these heavens
To us invisible, or dimly seen.
The one majestic phrase in the stanza:
From heaven angelic voices sound,
See the almighty Jesus crowned!
Girt with omnipotence and grace
And glory decks the Savior's face!
is from the discourse of Raphael:
. . . meanwhile the Son,
On His great expedition now appeared,
Girt with omnipotence, with radiance crowned.
Behind Milton's phrase there is, of course, the language of
Ps. 65:6.
The stanza in one of the hymns on holiness:
He wills that I should holy be,
That holiness I long to feel,
That full, divine conformity
To all my Savior's blessed will,
borrows a phrase from the address of Michael:
. . . . Judge not what is best
By pleasure, though to Nature seeming meet,
Created, as thou art, to nobler end,
Holy and pure, conformity divine.
Charles Wesley wrote, in another hymn:
For every sinful action
Thou hast atonement made,
The rigid satisfaction
Thy precious death hath paid.
The striking phrase is a quotation from Milton:
Die he or justice must; unless for him
Some other, able, and as willing, pay
The rigid satisfaction, death for death.
One phrase which occurs often in the hymns of the Wesleys is
particularly unfortunate; we mean that awkward ellipsis ‘the stony’:
The stony from my heart remove,
And give me, Lord, O give me love,
Or at Thy feet I die.
It sounds unpleasantly like Mr. Swiveller's references to the rosy
and the mazy. But the Wesleys were following the Miltonic usage, seen,
to give one example only, in the lines:
. . . For from the mercy-seat above
Prevenient grace descending had removed
The stony from their hearts.
A phrase from the magnificent lines with which the third book of
Paradise Lost begins was used by the Wesleys again and again:
Hail, holy Light! offspring of heaven first-born!
Or of the Eternal co-eternal Beam.
This is remembered in the beginning of a hymn:
Eternal Beam of Light Divine,
Fountain of unexhausted Love,
and in the dosing lines of one of John Wesley's splendid translations:
Thou Beam of the Eternal Beam,
Thou purging Fire, Thou quickening Flame!
There is nothing corresponding to this in Tersteegen's German.
It is John Wesley's remembrance of Milton. Doubtless the word had
behind it, in the thought of both Milton and Wesley, the
apaugasma
of the Apostolic writer in Heb. 1:3.
George Herbert
George Herbert was a favorite poet with both the Wesleys. They adapted
a considerable number of pieces from The Temple as hymns, and included
them in their early publications. They must have been familiar with Herbert
from childhood, for he was one of the writers most beloved by Susanna Wesley,
and probably they hardly knew when they were echoing his words.
The line in Obedience:
O let Thy sacred will
All Thy delight in me fulfil!
is borrowed in John Wesley's translation of
Zinzendorf's Du ewiger Abgrund der seligen
Liebe:
The dictates of Thy sovereign will,
With joy our grateful hearts receive;
All Thy delight in us fulfil;
Lo! all we are to Thee we give.
The first stanza of A True Hymn:
My joy, my life, my crown!
My heart was meaning all the day,
Somewhat it fain would say:
And still it runneth muttering up and down
With only this, ‘My joy, my life, my crown!’
has influenced the language of another of John
Wesley's translations, his great version of Scheffler's
Ich will dich lieben, meine Stärke,
where, in the last verse:
Thee will I love, my joy, my crown,
Thee will I love, my Lord, my God!
represents:
Ich will dich lichen, meine Krone,
Ich will dich lieben, meinen Gott.
And, curiously enough, in still another hymn from the German, John
Wesley's version of Joachim Lange's O Jesu, süsses Licht,
the lines:
O God, what offering shall I give
To Thee, the Lord of earth and skies?
My spirit, soul, and flesh receive,
A holy, living sacrifice;
Small as it is, 'tis all my store
More should'st Thou have, if I had more.
suggest a recollection of Herbert's Praise
To write a verse or two is all the praise
That I can raise:
Mend my estate in any ways
Thou shalt have more.
The last lines of the verse in Lange's German
are merely ‘Dass soll mein Opfer sein, Weil ich sonst nichts vermag.’
A phrase in The Pulley:
Let us (said He) pour on Him all we can:
Let the world's riches, which dispersèd lie,
Contract into a span,
is remembered and used nobly in a hymn for the Nativity:
Our God, contracted to a Span,
Incomprehensibly made man.
The lines in Longing:
Lord Jesu, Thou did'st bow
Thy dying head upon the tree,
are recalled in the verse:
Vessels, instruments of grace,
Pass we thus our happy days
'Twixt the mount and multitude,
Doing or receiving good;
Glad to pray and labor on,
Till our earthly course is run,
Till we, on the sacred tree,
Bow the head, and die like Thee.
The line in Sunday:
O let me take thee at the bound,
Leaping with thee from seven to seven,
Till that we both, being tossed from earth,
Fly hand in hand to heaven!
is remembered in another hymn:
Let us all together rise,
To Thy glorious life restored,
Here regain our paradise,
Here prepare to meet our Lord;
Here enjoy the earnest given,
Travel hand in hand to heaven!
And the thought in Praise:
Small it is, in this poor sort
To enrol Thee:
E'en eternity is too short
To extol Thee,
is remembered in a version of one of the Psalms:
And all eternity shall prove
Too short to utter all His love.
Dryden
Some of the reminiscences of Dryden's lines in the hymns are
striking and unmistakable, and altogether the allusions are enough
to show a pretty close acquaintance on the part of the Wesleys with
nearly all that the poet wrote.
Charles Wesley's fine evening hymn:
All praise to Him who dwells in bliss,
Who made both day and night:
Whose Throne is darkness in the abyss
Of uncreated light,
deliberately borrows a great line from The Hind and the Panther:
But, gracious God, how well dost Thou provide
For erring judgernents an unerring Guide!
Thy throne is darkness in the abyss of light,
A blaze of glory that forbids the sight.
One of the hymns for the Nativity recalls another line from the same
poem, for
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see,
Hail the incarnate Deity!
is an echo of Dryden's argument for Transubstantiation--
Could He His Godhead veil in flesh and blood,
And not veil these again to be our food?
The hymn:
Love Divine, all loves excelling,
Joy of heaven, to earth come down,
Fix in us Thy humble dwelling,
All Thy faithful mercies crown,
owes both its trochaic metre and the form of its first line to the
‘Song of Venus’ in King Arthur:
Fairest Isle, all isles excelling,
Seat of pleasures and of loves;
Venus here will choose her dwelling,
And forsake her Cyprian groves.
One of the hymns for Advent:
Stupendous height of heavenly love,
Of pitying tenderness divine!
It brought the Savior from above,
It caused the springing day to shine,
The Sun of Righteousness to appear,
And gild our gloomy hemisphere,
adopts a phrase from the juvenile and affected Elegy upon the Death
of Lord Hastings:
Lived Tycho now, struck with this ray (which shone
More bright i' th' morn than others beam at noon),
He'd take his astrolabe and seek out here,
What new star 'twas did gild our hemisphere.
The verse:
The things unknown to feeble sense,
Unseen by reason's glimmering ray
With strong commanding evidence,
Their heavenly origin display,
owes a phrase to the Religio Laici:
So reason's glimmering ray
Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way,
But guide us upward to a better day.
The hymn:
O God of God, in whom combine
The heights and depths of love divine,
With thankful hearts to Thee we sing:
To Thee our longing souls aspire,
In fervent flames of strong desire:
Come, and Thy sacred unction bring!
borrows an entire line from Dryden's translation of the Veni,
Creator Spiritus:
Come, and Thy sacred unction bring
To sanctify us while we sing!
One of the penitential hymns echoes a phrase of Dryden's which he used
in a very different connection. Wesley wrote:
The godly grief, the pleasing smart,
The meltings of a broken heart,
evidently remembering a lively love-song in The Maiden Queen:
I feel a flame within which so torments me
That it both pains my heart and yet contents me;
'Tis such a pleasing smart, and I so love it,
That I would rather die than once remove it.
And there are several other cases where single phrases or striking
epithets of Dryden's have passed, perhaps unconsciously, into the hymns.
So Wesley's ‘O'er earth in endless circles roved,’
is an echo of Religio Laici, ‘Thus anxious thoughts in endless
circles roll’; and ‘the all-atoning Lamb’ (which occurs frequently in the
hymns) borrows the epithet from a line in Absalom and Achitophel:
Then, seized with fear, yet still affecting fame,
Usurped a patriot's all-atoning name.
Cowley
There are one or two allusions to Cowley. In the verses entitled
Life occur the lines:
But angels in their full-enlightened state,
Angels who live, and know what tis to be!
Who all the nonsense of our language see,
And words, our ill-drawn pictures, scorn,
when we, by a foolish figure, say,
Behold an old man dead! then they
Speak properly, and say, Behold a man-child born!
This is recalled in one of the finest of the Funeral hymns:
When from flesh the spirit freed,
Hastens homeward to return,
Mortals cry, ‘A man is dead!’
Angels Sing, ‘A child is born!’
There is a slighter parallel in Prior, a favorite poet with both
the Wesleys:
And while the buried man we idly mourn,
Do angels joy to see his better half return?
A hymn, popularly supposed to have been written at Land's End, has the
lines:
Lo! on a narrow neck of land
'Twixt two unbounded seas I stand
Secure, insensible.
Cowley has the thought in Life:
Vain, weak-built isthmus which dost proudly rise
Up betwixt two eternities.
The comparison was frequent in the eighteenth century. Prior wrote
in Solomon:
Amid two Seas on one small point of land,
Wearied, uncertain, and amazed we stand.
And Pope, in the Essay on Man:
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great.
Addison has the thought in the Spectator, in language which
supplies the closest parallel of all:
in our speculations of Eternity, we consider the Time
which is present to us the Middle, which divides the whole time into two
equal Parts. For this Reason, many witty Authors compare the present Time
to an Isthmus or narrow Neck of Land that rises in the midst of an ocean,
immeasurably diffused on either Side of it.
Addison's ‘Spectator’
There are several other evidences in the hymns of that familiarity with
Addison's Spectator which we should expect on the part of the Wesleys.
A line of
Addison's version
of Ps. 23.
(which Wesley republished in the
Collection of Psalms and Hymns of 1738):
Thy friendly Crook shall give me Aid,
And guide me through the dreadful Shade,
is borrowed in one of the Advent hymns:
And cheer the souls of death afraid,
And guide them through the dreadful shade.
Dr. John Duncan once remarked upon the
curiosa filicitas of a line in the
stanza:
All are not lost and wandered back,
All have not left Thy Church and Thee;
There are who suffer for Thy sake,
Enjoy Thy glorious infamy,
Esteem the scandal of the Cross,
And only seek divine applause.
The happy phrase is borrowed, with a variation, from an apostrophe in
the paper which Steele contributed to the Spectator, on Good Friday,
1712 (it is really reprinted from The Christian Hero):
‘See where they have nailed the Lord and Giver of Life! How His
wounds blacken, His Body writhes, and Heart heaves with Pity
and with Agony! O Almighty Sufferer, look down,
look down from Thy triumphant Infamy!’
A French Sonnet
But the most striking illustration of the influence of the Spectator
is an example in which the verse of Charles Wesley was considerably
indebted to a French sonnet quoted by Addison in its pages -- an
indebtedness which was first indicated, in a very roundabout fashion,
by no less an eighteenth-century personage than Mrs. Piozzi.
Contemporary Critics
In 1745 the Rev. Thomas Church (the friend of Bolingbroke), who was
Vicar of Battersea and Prebendary of St. Paul's, published a pamphlet
entitled Remarks on the Rev. Mr. Wesley's Last Journal.
He was one of the fairest of Wesley's innumerable critics. Thirty years
afterwards, Wesley referred to him in contrast with Rowland
Hill, and said that he was ‘a gentleman, a scholar,
and a Christian: and as such he both spoke and
wrote.’ In the Remarks Church attacked the
‘extravagancy and presumption’ of the lines:
Doom, if Thou canst, to endless pains.
And drive me from Thy face;
But if Thy stronger love constrains,
Let me be saved by grace!
Wesley answered the Remarks in a letter addressed to the author,
and a second pamphlet, Some Further Remarks, in a second letter. He
expressed a natural amazement that the lines should have been so grossly
misunderstood, and defended them as being ‘one of the strongest
forms of obtestation, of adjuring God to show mercy, by all His grace,
and truth, and love.’
Mrs. Piozzi's Comment
Four years later, in 1749, Lavington, a much less reputable antagonist,
repeated Church's attack. He quoted the same lines, and reiterated
the charge of presumption, in The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists
Compared. A copy of the first edition of the first part of Lavington's
book was in the possession of Mrs. Piozzi, that lively lady who was Mrs.
Thrale in earlier life, the friend of Dr. Johnson, and familiar to all
readers of Boswell. She was very fond of writing marginal comments in her
books. One of her biographers has remarked upon the habit. She enriched the
margin of Lavington's book with considerable annotations. One of these
is a comment on the lines he quoted: ‘Doom, if
Thou canst, to endless pains. And drive me from
Thy face!’ She says that they are ‘in imitation of
the famous French sonnet by Despreaux, but by
an awkwardness of expression seem to lay the
Supreme Being under constraint of destiny, and
that is neither good philosophy nor good
religion. In the French sonnet there is no such fault.’
Des Barreaux
We were unable to discover any sonnet by the famous poet Despreaux,
better known as Boileau, which fits this reference; nor is he very likely
to have written such a one. This is, in fact, an example of the trivial
inaccuracy for which Boswell so often reproaches Mrs. Piozzi. For it is
a famous sonnet by Des Barreaux, a poet of the generation immediately
preceding Boileau, of which she was thinking. The editors of the
old collection of French poetryLes
Poètes François depuis le XIIe Sièle jusqa'à
Malherbe (1824).
in which we found it say that the reputation of Des Barreaux
‘rests upon a single sonnet, which is perhaps the
masterpiece of that kind of verse’ (le
chef-d'oeuvre de ce
genre). Almost immediately after finding this, we happened upon
an essay of Addison's in the Spectator, in which be quotes the sonnet
in full, and describes it as ‘a noble hymn in French ... written by
Monsieur Des Barreaux, who had been one of the greatest wits and libertines
in France, but in his last years as remarkable a penitent.’
Jacques Vallée, Seigneur des Barreaux, was born in 1602, and died in
1673. He was a counsellor in the Parliament of Paris, but would never plead
a cause, and eventually resigned the office, according to some accounts,
that he might devote himself wholly to pleasure. Another story is that
Cardinal Richelieu fell in love with the famous Marion de Lorme,
The heroine of Victor Hugo's drama.
who was Des Barreaux's mistress, and that after the Cardinal had made
some overtures to Des Barreaux, which he rejected, Richelieu became his
determined enemy, and forced him to give up his office, and leave Paris.
Bayle, Dictionnaire, vol. iv. pp. 577-581.
Des Barreaux wrote many Latin and French verses, but never published
anything. Pascal makes a casual reference to him. Writing in the
Pensées, of the war between reason and passion, he alleges
Des Barreaux as an example of ‘those who would renounce their reason
and become brute beasts.’ He lived an exceedingly dissolute life, but
in his later years repented and reformed, and spent his last days in
religious retirement at Chalon-sur-Saône.
He wrote this sonnet three or four years before his death. It is
entitled ‘A Sinner's Recourse to the Goodness of God.’ We have
roughly translated it thus:
O God, just are Thy judgements, just and right
Vast is Thy mercy, and Thy patience long;
But I have done such evil in Thy sight
As to forgive would do Thy justice wrong.
Sin has annulled Thy love's prerogative:
Thou canst not pardon such a wretch as I,
Thy righteousness forbids Thee to forgive,
Thy mercy must stand helpless while I die.
Then take Thy vengeance, Lord--I plead no more--
Mock at my tears, who mocked Thee to Thy face;
Strike, slay! avenge Thee on my hardihood--
I perish, yet Thy justice I adore;
But where shall fall Thy thunders? on what place
That is not covered with the Savior's blood?
The last lines of the French are:
Tonne, frappe, il est temps, rends-moi guerre pour guerre,
J'adore en perissant la raison qui t'aigrit;
Mais dessus quel endroit tombera ton tonnerre,
Qui ne soit tout couveit du sang de Jesus-Christ!
John Fletcher quotes the lines
Charles Wesley must have seen this sonnet in
the Spectator, and, besides, a letter is extant, written to him by
John Fletcher, which quotes some lines of it as if they were perfectly
familiar to them both.Tyerman's Life of Fletcher, p. 43.
Fletcher is describing his own experience at that time, when he was
passing through a season of spiritual depression: ‘It
seemed altogether incompatible with the holiness, the justice, and the
veracity of the Supreme Being to admit so stubborn an offender into His
presence. I could do nothing but be astonished at the patience of God; and
I would willingly have sung those verses of Desbaraux (sic) if I had had
strength:
Tonne, frappe, il est temps, rends-moi guerre pour guerre;
J'adore en perissant la raison qui t'aigrit.’
There is no doubt that the sonnet has considerably influenced the
verse of Charles Wesley. There are echoes of it in
But if my gracious day is past,
And I am banished from Thy sight,
When into outer darkness cast,
My Judge, I'll own, hath done me right,
Adore the Hand whose stroke I feel.
Nor murmur when I sink to hell.
and--
Then pour Thy vengeance on my head,
And quench the smoking flax in me;
Break (if Thou caust) a bruised reed,
And cast me out who come to Thee.
and--
While groaning at Thy feet I fall,
Spurn me away, refuse my call;
If love permit, contract Thy brow
And if Thou canst, destroy me now!
But there are some lines in one of the Eucharistic hymns which put
the matter beyond doubt, for the allusion to the last lines of the
sonnet is exact and unmistakable:
Still the wounds are open wide,
The blood doth freely flow,
As when first His sacred side
Received the deadly blow;
Still, O God, the blood is warm,
Covered with the blood we are;
Find a part it doth not arm,
And strike the sinner there!
John Fletcher, who has been mentioned as quoting Des Barreaux's
lines to Charles Wesley, was the saint of early Methodism.
John Fletcher's Ecstasy
In Wesley's Life of Fletcher, the following story is told in the
language of Joseph Benson, from whom Wesley received it:
‘I have sometimes seen him on these occasions [at Trevecca], once
in particular, so filled with the love of God, that he could contain
no more; but cried out, “O my God, withhold Thy hand, or the vessel
will burst!” But he afterwards told me he was afraid he had grieved
the Spirit of God; and that he ought rather to have prayed that the
Lord would have enlarged the vessel,
or have suffered it to break; that the soul might have no further bar
or interruption to its enjoyment of the supreme good.’Wesley's
Works, vol. xi. p. 296.
The most singular circumstance here is that the experience is
paralleled in the lives of many of the saints. It seems to be, if
the phrase may be allowed, a standard type of spiritual ecstasy.
It is related, in almost the same terms, with the same appeal against
such excessive bliss, in the lives of holy men and women as different from
John Fletcher as St. Francis Xavier, St. Philip Neri, and
Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque,--and, in our own days, Mr. Evan Roberts, the
leader of the Welsh Revival of 1905.
James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 243; Hagenbach,
History of the Reformation, ii. 409; and Bois,
Le Réveil
au Pays de Galles, p. 411.
But it was doubtless the wonderful experience of
Fletcher that is recalled in Charles Wesley's fervent lines:
O would He more of heaven bestow,
And let the vessel break!
And let our ransomed spirits go
To grasp the God we seek!
Samuel Wesley the younger
Both John and Charles Wesley owed much, in many ways, to their
elder brother Samuel. While he was Usher at Westminster School,
he was the trusted friend of Prior and Pope: and he was a poet himself,
not greatly gifted, but more than
the equal of others who have made a greater name. There are constant
reminiscences of his verse in the hymns.
In The Battle of the Sexes he wrote (addressing the lady who later
became his wife)
And thou, dear object of my growing love,
whom now I must not, or I dare not, name,
Approve my verse, which shines if you approve!
John Wesley borrowed a line of this in his translation of Spangenberg's
Der König ruht and schauet doch:
Great object of our growing love,
To whom our more than all we owe,
Open the fountain from above,
And let it our full souls o'erfiow
and the phrase is used many times in other hymns.
Many other lines in the same poem are quoted in the hymns, such as:
Now cruel false, now seeming faithful, kind,
With well-dressed hate, and well-dissembled love,
in--
O may I calmly wait,
Thy succors from above
And stand against their open hate,
And well-dissembled love,
and--
His hardened front, unblushing, unappalled,
Laughed at reproaches, and enjoyed disgrace,
in--
I then shall turn my steady face,
Want, pain defy, enjoy disgrace,
Glory in dissolution near!
and--
With cool disdain, The preacher he derides,
Who marks the eternal bounds of good and ill,
in--
To time our every smile or frown,
To mark the bounds of good and ill,
And beat the pride of nature down,
And bend or break his rising will.
Easter Hymn
In a Hymn on Easter Day, Samuel Wesley wrote:
In vain the stone, the watch, the seal,
Forbid an early rise,
To Him who breaks the gates of hell,
And opens Paradise.
This is closely copied in Charles Wesley's great Easter hymn,
‘Christ the Lord is risen today!’
Vain the stone, the watch, the seal,
Christ hath burst the gates of hell:
Death in vain forbids His rise,
Christ hath opened Paradise!
Samuel Wesley wrote an elegy On the Death of Mr. William Morgan.
He was an early associate of John and Charles Wesley at Oxford, whose
death they were accused of hastening by the austerities which the early
Methodists practised. In this poem occur these lines, describing Morgan:
Fearful of sin in every close disguise
Unmoved by threatening or by glozing lies,
Whose zeal, for other men's salvation shown,
Beyond the reach of hell secured his own.
Two phrases in these lines are reflected in the hymns:
I want a true regard,
A single, steady aim,
(Unmoved by threatening or reward),
To Thee, and Thy great Name.
Let us then sweet connsel take,
How to make our calling sure,
Our election how to make,
Past the reach of hell secure.
And there are many other phrases in the poems of Samuel Wesley that are
similarly reflected in the hymns written by his younger and more famous
brothers.
Prior
The hymns were were considerably influenced by the poems of Prior. There
is, of course, a special reason for the high esteem in which Prior was held
by all the Wesleys. He was the intimate friend of Atterbury--that
singular prelate of whom John Wesley has recorded so high an opinion.
And Samuel Wesley the younger, while Usher at Westminster School, was
the trusted companion of Atterbury. He would meet Prior many a time at
the Deanery, and John also, on his visits to the elder brother, would
doubtless see the good-natured poet frequently. One can irnagine that
the Usher would point the moral of Mr. Prior's rise to greatness
through scholarship--had he not been Ambassador at Paris, and did it
not all begin through construing Horace in
a tavern? At any rate, John Wesley held Prior in great esteem; and toward
the end of his life, in his Thoughts on the Character and Writings of
Mr. Prior, he went out of his way to defend the poet's memory.
An edition of Prior, with a memoir, appeared in 1779. Apparently
this occasioned the revival of some scandalous stories which had been set
about by Arbuthnot, Spence (of the Anecdotes), and Pope, as to the
identity of Prior's ‘Chloe.’ Wesley wrote: ‘I do not believe one word of
this. Although I was often in his neighborhood, I never heard a word of
it before. It carries no face of probability. Would Bishop Atterbury
have kept up an acquaintance with a man of such a character?’
Wesley passes on to express a high opinion of Prior's genius, and to
record his judgement that his best verse does ‘not yield to anything
that has been wrote either by Pope, or Dryden, or any English poet, except
Milton.’ Especially he praises Solomon, as containing ‘the
strongest sense expressed in some of the finest verses that ever
appeared in the English tongue.’
‘Solomon’
Charles Wesley shared his brother's admiration, and often recommended
Solomon to his younger
friends. He wrote, in a letter to his daughter Sally (Oct. 1, 1778):
‘You should therefore be always getting something by heart. Begin
with the first book of Prior's Solomon, the Vanity of Knowledge.
Let me see how much of it you can repeat when we meet.’
Accordingly we find frequent reminiscences of the poem in the hymns
of the brothers.
The second line of the couplet:
We weave the chaplet, and we crown the bowl,
And smiling see the nearer waters roll,
was clearly in the mind of Charles Wesley when he wrote:
Jesu, Lover of my soul,
Let me to Thy bosom fly,
While the nearer waters roll,
While the tempest still is high.
The lines spoken by the Egyptian:
Or grant thy passion has these names destroyed:
That Love, like Death, makes all distinction void,
were evidently the inspiration of a verse in the hymn which
Edward FitzGerald so much admired:
Love, like Death, hath all destroyed,
Rendered our distinctions void!
Names, and sects, and parties fall
Thou, O Christ, art all in all!
And Prior's apostrophe:
From Now, from instant Now, great Sire! dispel
The clouds that press my soul: from Now reveal
A gracious beam of light; from Now inspire
My tongue to sing, my hand to touch the lyre,
was apparently in the memory of the writer of the magnificent lines:
While low at Jesu's Cross I bow,
He hears the blood of sprinkling now.
This instant now I may receive
The answer of His powerful prayer:
This instant now by Him I live,
His prevalence with God declare.
There are also phrases of constant occurrence in the hymns that are
traceable to the same source. ‘The sun's directer rays’ (found in
hymns by both Samuel and Charles Wesley, and in a schoolboy translation of
Horace by John Wesley), ‘our cautioned soul,’ ‘my constant
flame,’--these are all from Solomon.
The other poems of Prior have not influenced the Wesleys so much, but
that is as we should expect; the difference of subject and tone amply
accounts for it. Still, there are a few clear allusions to the minor poems.
In his Ode to a Lady, She refusing to continue a Dispute with Me,
Prior wrote:
You, far from danger as from fear,
Might have sustained an open fight.
Charles Wesley wrote, in the hymn
‘Captain of Israel's host and Guide’:
As far from danger as from fear,
While Love, Almighty Love, is near.
In Charity, a Paraphrase of the Thirteenth
Chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, Prior wrote:
Soft peace she brings wherever she arrives,
She builds our quiet, as she forms our lives,
Lays the rough paths of peevish nature ev'n,
And opens in each heart a little heaven.
This is remembered in the hymn:
The peace Thou hast given, This moment impart,
And open Thy heaven, O Love, in my heart!
And once more, Prior wrote in his Henry and Emma, an abominable
Georgian perversion of a delightful old ballad (which John Wesley
republished in the Arminian Magazine, to the great scandal of some
of his followers)
If love, alas! be pain, the pain I bear
No thought can figure and no tongue declare.
John Wesley, in his superb translation of Gerhardt's hymn, wrote:
Jesu, Thy boundless love to me
No thought can reach, no tongue declare,
adopting Prior's phrase, and improving it.
Today Matthew Prior is very largely a forgotten poet. But he had
as much of the genuine poetic gift as any writer of his age. John Wesley,
in this matter at any rate, is in very good company, for he is at one
with writers as diverse as Cowper, Thackeray, and Swinburne, in his
admiration for the genius of Prior.
Prior's Influence
Something of the freedom of their versification the Wesleys certainly
owed to Prior. It was his influence that saved them from the monotonous
antithesis of the ‘correct’ style of Pope, and almost every
eighteenth-century writer, following in his train. In the Preface to
Solomon Prior wrote: ‘I would say one word of the measure in
which this and most poems of the age are written. Heroic with continued
rhyme, as Donne and his contemporaries used it, carrying the sense of one
verse most commonly into another, was found too dissolute and wild,
and came very often too near prose. As Davenant and Waller corrected,
and Dryden perfected it, it is too confined: it cuts off the sense at
the end of every first line, which must always rhyme to the next following,
and consequently produces too frequent an identity in the sound, and brings
every couplet to the point of an epigram.’ Johnson, in his Lives of
the Poets, characteristically decides that Prior's attempt to put his
critical principle into practice, ‘by extending the sense from one
couplet to another, with variety of pauses,’ is ‘without success:
his interrupted lines are unpleasing, and his sense, as less distinct,
is less striking.’ We do not agree: Solomon is more free, more
fluent, in its use of the heroic measure than any poem that was published
within the next three generations. One of Prior's favorite methods
of breaking the
monotony of the couplet brings about a pause after the second syllable
of the second line, as in
And at approach of death shall only know
The truths, . . . which from these pensive members flow.
On the vile worm, that yesterday began
To crawl; . . . Thy fellow creature, abject man!
Yet take thy bent, my soul; another sense
Indulge, . . . add music to magnificence.
John Wesley caught this trick of enjambement from Prior, and
his hymns abound with it. One or two examples will serve where dozens
might be given:
To gain earth's gilded toys, or flee
The Cross . . . endured, my God, by Thee?
A man! an heir of death! a slave
To sin! . . . a bubble on the wave.
Pope
The verse of the Wesleys has not been greatly influenced by the writings
of Pope, with the exception of a single poem. The hymns only contain two or
three slight allusions to the Essay on Man, but they echo the
language of Eloïsa to Abelard in the most extraordinary way.
Probably Charles Wesley had got the poem by heart, and hardly knew
when he was quoting it.
The first line of the couplet:
Thy eyes diffused a reconciling ray,
And gleams of glory brightened all the day,
is recalled in one of Charles Wesley's earliest
hymns, with a single change necessitated by the metre:
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray,
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light.
The lines:
To sounds of heavenly harps she dies away,
And melts in visions of eternal day,
are remembered in another hymn:
Till, on the bosom of my Lord,
I sink in blissful dreams away
And visions of eternal day.
The thought in the passage:
When, at the close of each sad, sorrowing day,
Fancy restores what vengeance snatched away,
Then conscience sleeps, and leaving nature free,
All my loose soul unbounded springs to thee,
is remembered and redeemed to a nobler significance in an evening hymn:
Loose me from the chains of sense,
Set me from the body free,
Draw, with stronger influence,
My unfettered soul to Thee!
In me, Lord, Thyself reveal,
Fill me with a sweet surprise:
Let me Thee when waking feel;
Let me in Thine image rise.
The lines in the same poem
O happy state, when souls each other draw,
When love is liberty, and nature law,
lines which Pope repeated with a variation in the Essay on Man:
Converse and love mankind might strongly draw,
When love was liberty, and nature law,
were evidently in Charles Wesley's mind when he wrote:
Implant it deep within,
Whence it may ne'er remove,
The law of liberty from sin,
The perfect law of love.
Thy nature be my law,
Thy spotless sanctity,
And sweetly every moment draw
My happy soul to Thee.
Young
It is difficult for us in these days to understand the immense vogue
of Young's Night Thoughts in the eighteenth century. Young's
turgid platitudes are so wearisome to a modern reader that it needs an
effort to discern the real poetic power which sometimes underlies the
bombastic lines, and which goes some way toward justifying the rather
fantastic judgement of D. G. Rossetti, that Young was the greatest poet
of his century. But there can be no doubt as to the extent of Young's
fame and influence in that age. Charles Wesley set his daughter to learn
by heart long passages of Young's poem, and he himself more than once
transcribed the whole of it. He said expressly: ‘No writings but the
inspired are more useful to me.’ And
some of the greatest names of that century might be quoted in support of
Charles Wesley's high estimate of Young. He was in good company,
at least, in his admiration for a poet who influenced Goethe, who was
quoted on the scaffold by Camille Desmoulins, and to the study of whose
writings Burke himself ascribed his own splendid style.
‘Night Thoughts’
One of the hymns:
Stand the omnipotent decree!
Jehovah's will be done!
Nature's end we wait to see,
And hear her final groan;
Let this earth dissolve, and blend
In death the wicked and the just,
Let those ponderous orbs descend,
And grind us into dust,
is a deliberate paraphrase of a passage in the Night Thoughts:
If so decreed, the Almighty Will be done,
Let earth dissolve, you pond'rous orbs descend,
And grind us into dust; the soul is safe;
The man emerges.
The lines:
they see
On earth a bounty not indulged on high,
And downward look for Heaven's superior praise,
are recalled in the verse:
Ye seraphs, nearest to the Throne,
With rapturous amaze,
On us, poor ransomed worms, look down
For Heaven's superior praise.
And the vivid but unfortunate image in the lines
Thou who didst save him, snatch the smoking brand
From out the flames, and quench it in Thy Blood,
is reproduced in many stanzas, such as:
I want an even strong desire,
I want a calmly fervent zeal,
To save poor souls out of the fire,
To snatch them from the verge of hell,
And turn them to a pardoning God,
And quench the brands in Jesu's blood!
Young's apostrophe:
Happy day that breaks our chain!
That manumits, that calls from exile home,
reappears in a hymn as:
O happy, happy day,
That calls Thy exiles home!
The heavens shall pass away,
The earth receive its doom;
Earth we shall view, and heaven destroyed,
And shout above the fiery void.
The verse:
His love, surpassing far
The love of all beneath,
We find within our hearts, and dare
The pointless darts of death,
borrows a phrase from Young's line
Death's pointless darts, and hell's defeated storms.
The lines
the rush of years
Beats down their strength; Their numberless escapes
In ruin end,
are remembered in a hymn which is a paraphrase of
Jer. 32:24:
The rush of numerous years bears down
The most gigantic strength of man;
And where is all his wisdom gone
When dust he turns to dust again?
Here Charles Wesley wrote ‘beats down,’ and the
word was altered to
‘bears down’ by John Wesley in his revision.
‘Last Day’
There are also several recollections in the hymns of Young's
Last Day. The apostrophe
Triumphant King of Glory! Soul of bliss!
What a stupendous turn of fate is this!
is recalled in the hymn for Easter
King of Glory! Soul of bliss!
Everlasting life is this,
Thee to know, Thy power to prove,
Thus to sing, and thus to love.
And the lines:
Drive back the tide, suspend a storm in air,
Arrest the sun, but still of this despair,
are adapted in another hymn, with a mystical sense of which Young was
utterly incapable:
Thou my impetuous spirit guide,
And curb my headstrong will,
Thou only canst drive back the tide,
And bid the sun stand still
The hymn (the only one on this dread subject included in the
Collection of 1780):
Terrible thought! shall I alone,
Who may be saved, shall I,
Of all, alas! whom I have known,
Through sin for ever die?
is based upon a neighboring passage in the same poem:
thy wretched self alone
Cast on the left of all whom Thou hast known,
How would it wound?
Many other examples of Young's influence might be quoted. Apart from
distinct allusions to his lines, he enriched the language of Charles
Wesley by favorite phrases, such as ‘the starry crown,’
‘the mighty void,’ and by favorite word such as
‘triumph’ and ‘pomp ’--the latter
occurring almost as incessantly in Young as in the hymns.
Links with Literature
It is not the least part of the spiritual privilege of Methodists that
these magnificent hymns have so many links with literature. Dryden called
Ben Jonson ‘the great plagiary,’ and spoke of ‘tracking his
footsteps in the snow.’ The Wesleys were great plagiarists, in
the same honorable sense, and it has not been an unpleasant or an unfruitful
task, we trust, to trace somewhat of their indebtedness, in thought and
language, to the great writers of the past. It has been rightly said that
one of the great charms of Milton is the ‘implicit lore’ of his
verse--the amount of scholarship that is held in solution in his
stately lines. There is a similar charm in the verse of the Wesleys: one
is always finding fresh evidence, embedded in the hymns, of their wide
reading and exact knowledge. These spiritual songs, like Prospero's
isle, are full of echoes.
The Hymns of Methodism are Unique
The hymns of Methodism stand alone, in many respects, in the religious
literature of the world. They are unique in their intimate connection with
one of the greatest spiritual movements of history, for the very genius of
the Evangelical Revival is in their burning lines: they enshrine what has
been well called ‘the holy, compassionate, believing spirit of early
Methodism.’ And, while they constitute the greatest body of devotional
verse in the language, they are wholly the work of those astonishing and
apostolic men who were not only brothers by blood, but also
brothers
In honor, as in one community,
Scholars and gentlemen.
APPENDICES
I
JOHN WESLEY'S TRANSLATIONS FROM THE GERMAN
- The following is a complete list of John Wesley's translations
from the German:
- Extended on a cursed tree.
- Welt, sieh bier dein Leben (Gerhardt).
- Jesu, thy boundless love to me.
- Jesu Christ, mein schönstes Licht (Gerhardt).
- Commit thou all thy griefs.
- Beflehl du deine Wege (Gerhardt).
- To Thee with heart and mouth I sing.
- Ich singe dir mit Herz und Mund (Gerhardt).
This hymn Wesley never published.
- Thee will I love, my strength, my tower.
- Ich will dich lieben, meine Starke (Scheffler).
- O God, of good the unfathomed sea.
- Du unvergleichlich Gut (Scheffler).
- Thou, Jesu, art our King.
- Dich, Jesu, loben wir (Scheffler).
- Jesu, Thy soul renew my own.
- Die Seele Christi heil'ge mich (Scheffler).
- Thou hidden love of God, whose height.
- Verborgne Gottes Liebe du (Tersteegen).
- Lo! God is here! let us adore.
- Gott ist gegenwärtig (Tersteegen).
- O God Thou bottomless Abyss.
- O Gott, du tiefe sonder Grund (Ernst Lange).
- O God, what offering shall I give.
- O Jesu, süsses Licht (Joachim Lange).
- Jesu, whose glory's streaming rays.
- Mein Jesu, dem die Seraphinen (Dessler).
- Shall I, for fear of feeble man.
- Sollt' ich aus Furcht vor Menschenkindern (Winckler).
- Thou Lamb of God, thou Prince of peace.
- Stilles Lamm und Friedefürst (Richter).
- My soul before Thee prostrate lies.
- Hier legt mom Sinn sich vor dir nieder (Richter).
- O Jesu, source of calm repose.
- Wer ist wohl wie du (Freylinghausen).
- Monarch of all, with lowly fear.
- Monarch al icr Ding (Freylinghausen).
- Jesu, thy blood and righteousness.
- Christi Blut und Gerechtigkeit (Zinzendorf).
- O Thou to whose all-searching sight.
- Seelen-Bräutigam, O du Gottes Lamm (Zinzendorf).
- Jesu, to Thee my heart I bow.
- Reiner Bräut'gam meiner Seele (Zinzendorf).
- O God of God, in whom combine.
- Herz, der göttlichen Natur (Zinzendorf).
- Eternal depth of love divine.
- Du ewiger Abgrund der seligen Liebe (Zinzendorf).
- O Thou whom sinners love, whose care.
- Verliebter in der Sünderschaft (Zinzendorf)
- All glory to the Eternal Three.
- Schau von deinem Thron (Zinzendorf).
- I thirst, thou wounded Lamb of God.
This hymn is a cento from four German hymns, Zinzendorf's
‘Ach, mein verwundter Fürste’ (verses 1-2 of the English), J.
Nitschmann's ‘Du blutiger Versühner’ (verses 3-6), Zinzendorf's
‘Der Gott von unserm Bunde’ (verse 7), and Anna Nitschmann's
‘Mein König! deine Liebe’ (verse 8). All these four hymns are in
the same supplement (Anhang) of the Herrnhut Gesangbuch.
- Now I have found the ground wherein.
- Ich habe nun den Grund gefunden (Rothe).
- Holy Lamb, who thee receive.
- Du heiliges Kind (Dober).
- What shall we offer our good Lord.
- Der König ruht and schauet doch (Spangenberg).
- Regardless now of things below.
- Eins Christen Herz (Maria M. Böhmer).
- Meek, patient Lamb of God, to Thee,
- O stilles Gottes Lamm (Gottfried Arnold).
- O Thou who all things canst control.
- Ach, triebe aus meiner Seele (Sigismund Gmelin).
- High praise to Thee, all gracious God.
- Sei hochgelobt, barmherz'ger Gott (Gotter).
II
QUIETISM AND CALVINISM
There were two movements, more or less within the Methodist Societies,
during the lifetime of the Wesleys, that threatened to wreck their work.
The first emanated from Molther and the Moravians, the second from
Whitefield and his followers.
A perverted Quietism, introduced by Molther, caused the breach with the
Moravians, and gave the Wesleys a great deal of trouble for some years
afterwards, especially in 1739 and 1740. Those who came under the spell
made much
of the text--the locus classicus of Quietism--‘Be still, and
know that I am God.’ ‘Stillness’ meant to cease from the
means of grace, and even from the reading of the Scriptures and prayer,
because of the peril of trusting in them. Those who were ‘still’
would call themselves nothing but ‘poor sinners’ or ‘happy
sinners’--greatly to the disgust of honest John Nelson, whose
robust common sense held ‘the poor sinnership’ in hearty
contempt. Two passages from Charles Wesley's Journal for
April, 1740, will sufficiently illustrate the situation and the peril.
‘April 8: I got home, weary, wounded, bruised, and faint, through the
contradiction of sinner; poor sinners, as they call themselves,
these heady, violent, fierce contenders for stillness. I could not bear the
thought of meeting them again.’ ‘April 25: Many here (in London)
insist that a part of their Christian calling is
liberty from obeying, not liberty to obey. The
unjustified, say they, are to be still: that is, not
to search the Scriptures, not to pray, not to
communicate, not to do good, not to endeavor,
not to desire for it is impossible to use means
without trusting in them. Their practice is
agreeable to their principles. Lazy and proud
themselves, bitter and censorious toward others,
they trample upon the ordinances and despise
the commands of Christ.’
There are many allusions to ‘stillness’ in the
hymns. One is headed ‘The True Stillness’:
Still for Thy loving kindness, Lord,
I in Thy Temple wait:
I look to find Thee in Thy word,
Or at Thy table meet.
Here in Thine own appointed ways
I wait to learn Thy will;
Silent I stand belore Thy face,
And hear Thee say, ‘Be still!’
‘Be still, and know that I am God!’
'Tis all I live to know!
To feel the virtue of Thy blood,
And spread its praise below!
Another hymn has the lines,
Place no longer let us give
To the old Tempter's will;
Never more our deity leave,
While Satan cries, ‘Be still!’
Stand we in the ancient way,
And here with God ourselves acquaint;
Pray we, every moment pray,
And never, never faint.
Another hymn is a lament over those who had lapsed into ‘stillness’:
Whom still we love with grief and pain,
And weep for their return in vain.
In vain, till Thou the power bestow,
The double power of quickening grace!
And make the happy sinners know
Their Tempter, with his angel face;
Who leads Them captive at his will,
Captive--but happy sinners still!
Another is entitled ‘A Poor Sinner’:
I would be truly still,
Nor set a time to Thee,
But act according to Thy will
And speak, and think, and be.
I would with Thee be one;
And till the grace is given,
Incessant pray, Thy will be done,
In earth as 'tis in heaven.
The other movement was the Calvinistic propaganda. Many of the hymns
of Methodism reflect the life-long controversy of the Wesleys with the
Calvinists.
It was undoubtedly these great hymns that were largely accountable for
the diffusion of Arminian doctrine throughout evangelical Christendom.
In this respect they mark a theological epoch. For the work of the Wesleys
was the death of Calvinism, or at least of its baser nature.
The Calvinism that survives in the world today is a thing refined,
rarefied. The baser sort of Calvinism is so utterly extinct in our
days--thanks to Methodism--that it is difficult for us to realize
that it ever existed. The sublimated spirit of Calvinism that lives in
the modern representatives of the Reformed Churches we can admire greatly.
The deep sense of the sinfulness of sin, the profound apprehension of
grace as utterly and unutterably
undeserved, the humility and the reverence which attend upon these
thoughts--all these are spiritual characteristics for which we cannot be
too thankful. And we could willingly detect more of all these notes in
modern religion.
There, indeed, lies at once the source and the strength of all that is
best in Calvinism. The doctrine of Calvin is the doctrine of Augustine,
extended to its relentless issue, and it is in the religious experience
of Augustine that we must seek the germ of his doctrine. It was
Augustine's deep conviction of sin and his sense of absolute helplessness
apart from the overmastering and overwhelming grace of God--it was this,
passing into his writings, and, after many centuries, developed with
pitiless logic, by a mind much more formal and much less subtle than his,
which became Calvinism. At this time of day we can afford to recognize
that the noble source of the doctrinal perversion was nothing less than
that deep instinct of the Christian soul which is expressed in the
language of Toplady:
Nothing in my hand I bring,
Simply to Thy Cross I cling!
This is the better side: there was a worse. There is plentiful evidence
of that in the early literature of Methodism. Charles Wesley once quoted
from Calvin's Institutes (l. iii. c. 24) a
frightful passage concerning the reprobate,
‘God speaketh to them that they may be the
deafer: He gives light to them that they may be the blinder; He offers
instruction to them that they may be the more ignorant; and uses the
remedy that they may not be healed.’ And elsewhere the poet of
Methodism records that during his exposition of a controverted passage of
Scripture at Bristol one of his hearers ‘even called for damnation
upon his own soul if Christ died for all, and if God was willing THAT ALL MEN
SHOULD BE SAVED.’ This was the faith, and this the temper of
eighteenth-century Calvinism. And this was where the early Methodists joined
issue with the ‘doctrines of grace.’ What the Wesleys contended
for was a universal gospel; what they denied vehemently was that doctrine
of election which, as John Wesley said, amounted to this: ‘One
in twenty (suppose) of mankind are elected; nineteen in twenty are
reprobated. The elect shall be saved, do what they will; the reprobate
shall be damned, do what they can.’
It is characteristic that the reasons for which the Wesleys opposed
Calvinism were all practical reasons. It disturbed the peace of the
Societies, and they were forced to fight it for the sake of peace. It
appeared amongst the early Methodists as an alien propaganda, and it had
to be encountered. Then it led undoubtedly to serious laxity of conduct:
the Antinomian peril was very real in the early days of Methodism, and it
was largely the result of Predestinarian doctrine.
Antinomianism was not then the mere ghost of dead heresy or the bold
paradox of exalted pietism, but a hideous danger, which the Wesleys met
everywhere. And then the doctrinal grounds of opposition were also practical.
Neither of the Wesleys had much interest in speculative theology. But
they preached an illimitable salvation; they denied that there was any
limit whatever to the gospel except such as was set by the unwillingness
of men to accept salvation. They taught that the forgiving love of God was
boundless.
The literature of the controversy between Methodism and Calvinism is
today largely forgotten. It is as well so. The pamphlets and sermons of
1740 and 1770, the publications of Wesley, Fletcher, and Olivers on the
one side, and of Whitefield, Toplady, and Sir Richard Hill on the other,
have only an antiquarian interest. All that really survives today from
that remote contest is a batch of hymns--Toplady's ‘Rock
of Ages! cleft for me.’--and many of the stirring
stanzas that Charles Wesley wrote at the time. Several
of these familiar hymns, indeed, can scarcely be
understood as they ought unless we remember the
implicit protest against a limited gospel which they contain.
The world He suffered to redeem:
For all He hath the atonement made;
For those that will not come to Him
The ransom of His life was paid!
O for a trumpet voice
On all the world to call!
To bid their hearts rejoice
In Him who died for all!
For all my Lord was crucified,
For all, for all my Savior died!
O let Thy love my heart constrain,
Thy love for every sinner free,
That every fallen soul of man
May taste the grace that found out me;
That all mankind with me may prove
Thy sovereign, everlasting love.
But if it be asked where in these hymns of controversy Charles
Wesley's most effective protest against the doctrine of Calvin is
to be found, there can be little doubt, we think, that it is in
precisely those lines which express the deepest depth of humility,
the lines in which he writes of the grace of God:
Throughout the world its breadth is known,
Wide as infinity!
So wide, it never passed by one,
Or it had passed by me.
III
ARCHAISMS IN THE HYMNS
The style of Wesley's hymns is distinctly the most modern poetical
style of the period. There are, however, a few archaisms, all of which are
dealt with, we believe, in the following notes.
In the examples from the hymns, the numbers given are those of the
Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists
(1780).
1. WORDS USED WITH AN OBSOLETE PRONUNCIATION.
ÁCCEPTABLE
Thou our sacrifice receive,
Acceptable through Thy Son.Hy. 415-1.
The older pronunciation, as in Milton:
Thy perfect gift, so good,
So fit, so acceptable, so divine.(Paradise Lost, X., 139.)
CÉMENTED
Cemented by love divine,
Seal our souls for ever Thine!498-1.
The older pronunciation, as in Shakespeare:
The fear of us
May cement their divisions, and bind up
The petty difference.(Antony & Cleopatra, II., i. 48.)
But this pronunciation was already giving way before Wesley's time.
Witness the lines of Swift, in the City Shower (1710):
Sole coat! where dust cemented by the rain,
Erects the nap, and leaves a cloudy stain!
CÓNFESSOR
His friends and confessors to own,
And seat us on our glorious throne.471-5.
This is the historical pronunciation, which did not give way until
the beginning of the nineteenth century. After this, for a while, both
pronunciations were current, and there was an attempt to distinguish the
two senses of the word by the differing accents--cónfessor, one who
witnesses for religion in the face of danger--the meaning of the word
in the hymn--conféssor one who makes or receives confession of a
fault.
But Wesley's pronunciation was universal up to his time, and for years
after. So in Dryden (using the word in the second sense):
For sundry years before did he complain,
And told his ghostly confessor his pain.(Hind and Panther, III., 210.)
OBDÚRATE
Give the sweet relenting grace,
Soften this obdurate stone!98-1.
The older pronunciation, as always in Shakespeare and Milton:
His baleful eyes,
That witnessed huge affliction and dismay,
Mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate.(Paradise Lost, I., 58.)
SÚCCESSOR
Where shall I wander now to find,
The successors they left behind?
The older pronunciation as in Dryden:
I here declare you rightful successor,
And heir immediate to my crown.(Secret Love, V., 1.)
2. WORDS USED IN AN OBSOLETE SENSE.
PREVENT
He prevents His creatures' call,
Kind and merciful to all.228-1.
This, of course, is the old and primary sense of the word, as in
the collect:
Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings with Thy most
gracious favor.
And in Izaak Walton, who records that be rose
early to go fishing, ‘preventing the sunrise.’
PROPRIETY
Whate'er I have was freely given;
Nothing but sin I call my own:
Other propriety disclaim.
Thou only art the great I AM.323-4
This is the Latin sense of the word--what we
mean now by ‘property, proprietorship.’ So, in Milton:
Hail, wedded Love, mysterious law, true source
Of human offspring, sole propriety
In Paradise of all things common else!(Paradise Lost, IV., 750.)
RESENT
My inmost bowels shalt resent
The yearnings of Thy dying love.24-14.
When the word was first introduced into the language, in the seventeenth
century, it simply meant, as the French
ressentir
still does, to feel--‘to have a sense or feeling of that which had
been done to us, but whether a sense of gratitude
for tbe good, or of enmity for the evil, the word
said nothing’ (Trench, Select Glossary, p. 186).
It was only gradually that the sense of the word
was narrowed to express angry feeling alone.
The earlier and wider significance of the word
(as in the hymn) is seen in these examples:
It was mighty well resented and approved of.
(Pepys' Diary, 13th February, 1669.)
'Tis by my touch alone that you resent
What objects yield delight, what discontent.(Beaumont, Psyche IV., 156.)
UNITARIAN
The Unitarian fiend expel,
And chase his doctrine back to hell.431-3.
Remarks have often been ignorantly made on the bitter intolerance of
these lines, which many have understood as referring to the teaching of
those whom we now call Unitarians. The fact is, of course, that they refer
solely to Mahometanism. The hymn is headed, in the Collection of 1780,
‘For the Mahometans’
(in the pamphlet in which it was originally published,
‘For the Turks’), and it is full of specific allusions to Mahomet,
‘That Arab-thief, as Satan bold, Who quite destroyed Thine Asian fold.’
The use of of Unitarian in reference to Moslem doctrine is quite correct,
and, in the eighteenth century, was quite common. Gibbon, in describing the
rise of Islam, refers again and again to the march of the Unitarian
armies, the advance of the Unitarian banners. Those Christians who
deny the Divinity of Christ were always called Socinians in Wesley's
time; it was only at the end of the eighteenth century that they began
to be generally called Unitarians. Indeed the next hymn but one to this in
the Hymns of Intercession for all Mankind (1758), is entitled
‘For the Arians, Socinians, Deists, Pelagians, &c.’
3. OBSOLETE GRAMMATICAL USAGE.
There is one grammatical archaism which frequently recurs in the
hymns--the use of the Preterite for the Passive Participle, as in
The Sun of Righteousness on me
Hath rose with healing in his wings.136-10.
Holiness unto the Lord,
Still be wrote upon our heart.415-2.
and innumerable other examples.
Wesley, in his Short English Grammar, published in 1748, gives
‘rose’ and ‘strove’ as being both the Imperfect and the Passive
Participle of ‘rise’ and ‘strive.’ He gives ‘writ’ or ‘wrote’ as
the Imperfect, and ‘written’ as the Participle of ‘write.’
In the Gentleman's Magazine of 1758 there is a witty poem by
Dr. Byrom, The Passive Participle's Petition:
Till just of late, good English has thought fit
To call me written, or to call me writ:
But what is writ or written, by the vote
Of writers now, hereafter must be wrote,
And what is spoken, too, hereafter spoke,
And measures never to be broken, broke.
I never could be driven, but in spite
Of Grammar, they have drove me from my right.
None could have risen, to become my foes:
But what a world of enemies have rose!
Who have not gone, but they have went about,
And, torn as I have been, have tore me out.
The poem, which was probably suggested by
The Humble Petition of Who and Which,
in the Spectator, ends with the appeal:
Let all The learned take some better heed,
And leave the vulgar to confound the due
Of preter sense, and participle too.
Dr. Lowth also protested against this usage, and declared: ‘This
abuse has been long growing upon us, and is continually making further
encroachments.’
On the other hand, Home Tooke, in the Diversions of Pitney (1786),
maintained that it was not a growing usage, but one which had greatly
decreased; that it was not an innovation, but ‘the idiom of the
language’; and that examples of it might be given ‘from
every writer in the English tongue.’ The pioneer of English
philology was right. Byrom was mistaken in thinking the usage of
recent introduction. It occurs more or less in all
English writers until the middle of the eighteenth century. So
Shakespeare, where Queen Katherine says in Henry VIII (ii. 4,30)
Or which of your friends
Have I not strove to love, although I knew
He were mine enemy?
and where Edmund says in King Lear (i. 2, 93):
I dare pawn down my life for him, that he hath
wrote this to feel my affection to your honor.
And often in Dryden:
I made a sacred and a solemn vow
To offer up the prisoners that were took.Indian Queen, II., 1.
Nevertheless, we have a strong impression that the practice of using the
Preterite instead of the Participle was commoner in the early eighteenth
century than it had ever been before,
and we would suggest that this was because the age had become sensitive
to the confusion, and was endeavoring to reach a consistent usage--either
by making the Preterite regularly serve instead of the Participle, as
the Wesleys did, or by distinguishing regularly between them--the
usage which finally prevailed. Lowth and Byrom felt that the use of the
Preterite for the Participle was becoming more common, as in some writers
it probably was, through an effort after consistency, and they concluded
that it was a new abuse, which it was not.
And, finally, there is the use of ‘rent’ for ‘rend’:
My stony heart Thy voice shall rent,
Thou wilt, I trust, the veil remove.24-14.
John Wesley, in his Short English Grammar, gives ‘rend’ as the
Present Tense, and ‘rent’ as the Imperfect; but Charles Wesley,
in the hymns, consistently used ‘rent’ as the Present Tense of
the verb. There is warrant for it in earlier writers, as in Shakespeare:
And will yon rent our ancient love asunder
To join with men in scorning your poor friend?(Midsummer Night's Dream, iii., 2, 215.)
And in George Herbert:
Better by worms be all once spent,
Than to have hellish moths still gnaw and fret
Thy name in books, which may not rent.(Content, 43)
‘Rent’ as the Present Tense occurred in
several passages of the Authorized Version of the
Bible, but it has been altered in later editions in
every case but one (Jer. 4:30).
‘Rend’ and ‘rent’ would appear to have
been used indifferently for the Present Tense--as
they are in Shakespeare--until nearly Wesley's time.
Indexes
Index of Scripture References
Index of Hebrew Words and Phrases
- H to Qeion pascei, h tw pasconti sumpascei:
1
- Pan o megas teqnhken:
1
- alla qarseute:
1
- anakekalummenoV:
1
- anakekalummenw proswpw:
1
- anazwpurein:
1
2
- apaugasma:
1
- apo blefouV ta iera grammata oidaV:
1
- cristos gennatai doxasate:
1
- diadhma:
1
- diaqhkh:
1
2
- didaskonteV:
1
- eauton ekenwte:
1
- efrourei:
1
- filanqrwpia:
1
- frourhsei:
1
- kainh ktisiV:
1
- kalumma:
1
- katapausiV:
1
- maqheusate:
1
- melei:
1
- merimnan:
1
- niyasqai:
1
- o emos eros estaurwtai:
1
- o leloumenoV:
1
- o ths dikaiosunhV stefanoV:
1
- orfanouV:
1
- panoplia:
1
- politeuma:
1
- sabbatismoV:
1
- stefanoV:
1
2
3
- ton agwna ton kalon:
1
- ton stefanoV thV zohV:
1
- upo PneumatoV Agion feromeuoi elalhsan oi agioi Qeou anqrwpoi:
1
- ws kai tines twn kaq umas poihtwn eirhkasi ...:
1
Index of Latin Words and Phrases
- Aegrotus sum, ad medicum clamo: caecus sum, ad lucem propero: mortuus sum, ad vitam suspiro. Tu es medicus, tu lux, tu vita. Jesu Nazarene, miserere mei:
1
- Anima Christi sanctifica me:
1
- Coelum gaude terra plaude:
1
- Cujus una stilla salvum facere:
1
- De Carne Christi:
1
- De Oraculorum Delectu:
1
- Dies irae, dies illa:
1
- Eia, Domine, moriar ut te videam. Videam, ut hic moriar:
1
- Et quae marmoreo fert monstra sub aequore pontus.:
1
- Et video nunc quia donum tuum est:
1
- In dulci jubilo:
1
- Inde hominum pecudumque genus vitaeque volantum:
1
- Inpavidum ferient ruinae. (iii. 3.):
1
- Jesu dulcis memoria:
1
- Justum et tenacem propositi virum:
1
- Lucentemque globum Lunae Titaniaque astra:
1
- Me immundum myinda tuo sanguine,:
1
- Mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet.:
1
- Moriar ne moriar, ut cam videam):
1
- Moriar ut te videam!:
1
- Natus est Dei Filius; non pudet quia pudendum est; et mortuus est Dei Filius; prorsus credibile est quia ineptum est; et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile.:
1
- Principio caelum ac terras camposque liquentis:
1
- Puer natus in Bethlehem:
1
- Quoniam Si quid boni est parvum vel magnum, donum tuum est, et nostrum non est nisi malum:
1
- Quoties diem ilium considero, toto corpore contremisco, sive enim comedo, sive bibo, sive aliquid aliud facio, semper videtur illa tuba terribilis sonare in auribus meis, Surgite, mortui, venite ad judicum.:
1
- Salve festa dies toto venerabilis aevo, Qua Deus ad coelos scandit et astra tenet:
1
- Sed cur faciem tuam abscondis? Forte dicis non videbit me homo et vivet:
1
- Si fractus illabitur orbis,:
1
- Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus:
1
- Surgite, mortui, venite ad judicum:
1
- Totum mundum quit ab omni scelere,:
1
- Tu donum, tu donator:
1
- Tu qui dator es et donum:
1
- Veni, Creator Spiritus:
1
- curiosa filicitas:
1
- pulchritudo antiqua:
1
Index of German Words and Phrases
- Ach, dass ich dich so spät erkennet, Du hochgelobte Schönheit du!:
1
- Ach, triebe aus meiner Seele:
1
- Barmherzigkeit! Barmherzigkeit!:
1
- Beflehl du deine Wege:
1
- Christi Blut und Gerechtigkeit:
1
- Da findet kein Verdammen statt,:
1
- Das Gesang-Buch der Gemeine in Herrn-Huth:
1
- Das heisst die Wunde recht verbinden,:
1
- Dass deine Lieb’ so Grosses an uns thut?:
1
- Dass soll mein Opfer sein, Weil ich sonst nichts vermag:
1
- Der König ruht and schauet doch:
1
2
- Der tiefeste Verstand, der alles glücklich führet.:
1
- Dich, Jesu, loben wir:
1
- Die Seele Christi heil'ge mich:
1
2
- Du bist die Schönheit selbst, Du kannst nichts Schönres finden! Es kann dich nichts als nur Dein eigne Schönheit binden.:
1
- Du bist die Weisheit selbst die ewiglich regieret,:
1
- Du ewiger Abgrund der seligen Liebe:
1
2
- Du heiliges Kind:
1
- Du segnest uns in ihm, dem Herm,:
1
- Du unvergleichlich Gut:
1
2
- Durch Christi Tod verschlungen hat!:
1
- Eins Christen Herz:
1
- Erklärte Offenbarung Johannis:
1
- Erklärte Offenbarung Johannis, und vielmehr Jesu Christi:
1
- Evangelischer Liederschatz:
1
- Gott ist gegenwärtig:
1
- Herz, der göttlichen Natur:
1
- Hier legt mein Sinn sich vor dir nieder:
1
- Hier legt mom Sinn sich vor dir nieder:
1
- Ich bin nicht stille, wie ich soll:
1
- Ich fühles ist dem Geist nicht wohl,:
1
- Ich habe nun den Grund gefunden:
1
- Ich singe dir mit Herz und Mund:
1
2
3
- Ich will dich lichen, meine Krone,:
1
- Ich will dich lieben, meine Stärke:
1
- Ich will dich lieben, meine Starke:
1
- Ich will dich lieben, meinen Gott.:
1
- Ich will dich tiebe, meine Stärke:
1
- Jesu Christ, mein schönstes Licht:
1
- Mein Jesu, dem die Seraphinen:
1
- Mit überschwenglich reichem Segen,:
1
- Mit deiner theurern Gnad’ entgegen,:
1
- Monarch al icr Ding:
1
- O Abgrund, weicher alle Sünden:
1
- O Gott, du tiefe sonder Grund:
1
- O Jesu, süsses Licht:
1
2
- O stilles Gottes Lamm:
1
- Reiner Bräut'gam meiner Seele:
1
2
- Schau von deinem Thron:
1
- Seelen-Bräutigam, O du Gottes Lamm:
1
- Sei hochgelobt, barmherz'ger Gott:
1
- Sollt' ich aus Furcht vor Menschenkindern:
1
- Stilles Lamm und Friedefürst:
1
- Und gehest unser Armut gern:
1
- Verborgne Gottes Liebe du:
1
2
- Verliebter in der Sünderschaft:
1
- Was sind wir doch, du allerschönstes Gut,:
1
- Weil Christi Blut beständig schreit,:
1
- Weil er in dir nicht stehet.:
1
- Welt, sieh bier dein Leben:
1
- Wer ist wohl wie du:
1
- der alle Hilfe thut, so auf Er den geschieht:
1
- die Schonheit selbst:
1
- du der alles heyl und hilff (das in der gantzen welt geschieht) allein thust:
1
- ein recht apocalyptisches Wort:
1
Index of French Words and Phrases
- J'adore en perissant la raison qui t'aigrit.’:
1
- J'adore en perissant la raison qui t'aigrit;:
1
- Les Poètes François depuis le XIIe Sièle jusqa'à Malherbe:
1
- Mais dessus quel endroit tombera ton tonnerre,:
1
- Qui ne soit tout couveit du sang de Jesus-Christ!:
1
- Tonne, frappe, il est temps, rends-moi guerre pour guerre,:
1
- Tonne, frappe, il est temps, rends-moi guerre pour guerre;:
1
- le chef-d'oeuvre de ce genre:
1
- ressentir:
1
Index of Pages of the Print Edition