And can it be that I should gain

Considered as a text, this has much affinity with 751; both begin with a sense of humble wonder and recall Charles Wesley’s conversion in 1738. The likely order is that Where shall my wondering soul begin was truly the beginning and that this one followed, both in Little Britain near St Paul’s Cathedral; a year later came the very different opening to 324, ‘For the Anniversary Day of one’s Conversion.’ But this text, starting with a question, raises (for such a popular hymn among evangelicals) a surprising number of further ones. First, its authorship; while nearly all books confidently assign it to Charles, since Henry Bett in 1945 a distinguished minority of Wesley scholars have suggested that it bears the hallmarks of John. Second, its doctrine; no doubt its author wrote ‘emptied himself of all but love’ in a spirit of exuberant devotion, but many have noted that this line (while finding its starting point in Philippians 2:7, from one who also delighted to be precise) will not bear much theological examination. Like many such phrases from lesser writers it will be taken more literally than it should be, and some will want to squeeze ‘kenotic’ theories of Christ’s ignorance or error, for example, from such words. The Praise! alternative appears at 3.3; other options include ‘emptied himself in all his love’, etc.

A third difficulty felt by some is that while the hymn’s dramatic exuberance was appropriate enough for either brother or indeed their successors in the immediate afterglow of conversion, for many it is less appropriate for continued use. The threefold ‘for me’ in stz 1 may reflect not only the author’s vivid experience, but his reading (17 May 1738) from Luther on Galatians: ‘Lay hold of this little word me with a sure faith and apply it to thyself …’ But further 1st-person claims such as ‘Long my imprisoned spirit lay …’ may be simply untrue. (Some of these factors may have contributed to the decision of the PHRW editors to reduce it to 3 stzs only, though they retain what here is stz 4.) The heightened emotion of the words is taken up a further notch by the use of the tune SAGINA—see below—which constitutes a 4th problem. And a 5th, not entirely of the editors’ own making, confronts any who see the need to modernise the text of stz 4. Wesley half-borrowed from Alexander Pope a line that has not worn well (4.3, ‘thine eye diffused a quickening ray’); and moving into ‘you’ language in lines 5–6 there is a straight choice between retaining ‘… my heart was free’ and adapting what follows, losing the sequence of ‘rose, went forth, and followed …’; or keeping these verbs, ‘… and followed you’, and changing line 5 as here. This difficulty persuaded the HTC editors to make it one of the few hymns to appear in two versions, ‘Revised’ and ‘Traditional’. Compared with these, the changes in 2.1, 2.5 and 3.5 (with repeats) from ‘’Tis mystery all … ’Tis mercy all …’ are not great. A smaller question arises from a favourite Wesleyan allusion to the final words of 1 Peter 1:12 in 2.3; his ‘first-born seraph’ seems to stretch that Scripture and has puzzled many (cf 813 stz 2), so ‘highest angel’ seems a suitable replacement.

Before we resolve to stay after all with the original text, it is worth recalling that this included a penultimate verse which no current book prints: ‘Still the small inward voice I hear,/ that whispers all my sins forgiven;/ still the atoning blood is near,/ that quenched the wrath of hostile heaven:/ I feel the life his wounds impart;/ I feel the Saviour in my heart.’ We may regret the loss of some features there, while being relieved that we are not asked to sing that to SAGINA.

Having outlined such questions and suggested some responses, it would be sad if the difficulties were allowed to overshadow the greatness of the text, our understanding of its truth or the blessings to be experienced in singing it. It is rightly called a tour de force; its breathless opening, bold language, dramatic development, and controlled use of repetition, paradox and question have often been noted. It is disappointing only that those books welcoming the ‘eucharistic’ texts of the Wesleys (ruled as they are by the extravagant doctrines of Daniel Brevint) should so often overlook the more obviously ‘catholic’ theology of Christian assurance expressed here, with a little help from 1 Peter 1:12 used wonderingly, Acts 12 figuratively and Romans 8 directly, among the usual Wesleyan range of other Scriptures. When the text appeared (with 6 stzs) in the 1739 Hymns and Sacred Poems it was happily and uncontroversially headed ‘Free Grace’; it was the 1780 Collection which omitted the ‘small inward voice’ lines. Among many discussions of its various aspects, see John Wilson in HSB190, Jan 1992. Whichever Wesley wrote it, in March 1791 its final couplet was among John’s last words; and the May 1738 experience of both brothers, so strongly reflected in the hymn, remains ‘a warning to church people that it is not enough to be religious, moral and orthodox’—F Colquhoun. The traditional 5-stz hymn is Dr Billy Graham’s favourite; Archbishop Rowan Williams also named it as his in 2010.

What then of the music? SAGINA came on the scene in Thomas Campbell’s The Bouquet of 1825, the 23 tunes of which were given botanical names; ‘sagina’ is a genus of the pink family, from the Lat word for ‘nourish’ or ‘fatten’. In 1889 the tune entered the Appendix of The Primitive Methodist Hymnal, and it found a similar slot in the 1904 Methodist Hymn Book. It was not until 1922 that it was set to these Wesley words; the New People’s Hymnary began the association which the 1933 Methodist Hymn Book continued and which most others have followed. So for 183 years the hymn survived without the music which for many is now indispensable, and which incidentally demands repetitions never intended by its author. While the tune finely reflects the confidence of the hymn’s climax, it seems strangely mismatched to the opening mood of personal, questioning wonder. The 1965 Anglican Hymn Book valiantly but vainly insisted on SURREY (=CAREY, 240); more recently Erik Routley’s ABINGDON and Cyril Taylor’s DIDSBURY have attempted to do justice to the thoughtfulness as well as the splendour of the words. John Wesley’s choice for ‘the Foundery’ in 1742 (and possibly on the night of his conversion) was Samuel Akeroyd’s CRUCIFIXION TUNE, known since 1701, with a few quavers but no repeats. Praise! has stayed with the currently favoured tune and provided it with a new arrangement. The most we can hope, with Wesley Milgate, is that it will be sung with the mind and ‘not with unrelenting heartiness’.

b Epworth, Lincolnshire 1707, d London 1788. The youngest of 17 children born to Samuel and Susanna, he scarcely survived birth. Somehow he also survived a hugely talented but chronically poor and often dysfunctional family, taught and held together by his mother through multiple disasters. At Westminster Sch he was nurtured by his gifted elder brother Samuel; at Christ Ch Oxford, supported by John W and others in 1728–29, he founded the ‘Holy Club’ which earned the nickname of ‘Methodists’. A fellow-student John Gambold described him as ‘a man made for friendship’; he certainly befriended and encouraged the younger and poorer student George Whitefield. Under pressure from his brother John, Charles was ordained in 1735 (delighting later to call himself ‘Presbyter of the Church of England’) in order to travel with him on a neardisastrous visit to the young colony of Georgia, which however brought the brothers into contact with Moravian missionaries. While putting a positive public spin on his adventures, but partly driven by the Moravian sense of assurance, he experienced an evangelical conversion on 21 May 1738, shortly before John’s more celebrated ‘heart-warming’. Charles’s journal is shorter, rather more transparent and less contrived than his brother’s; he was never a self-propagandist. But in 1964 the historian F C Gill called him ‘the first Methodist’ (from his Oxford initiatives) and ‘the apostle of the north’ (from his labours around Newcastle).

Like John’s inward transformation, Charles’s suffered many setbacks, but his hymnwriting began immediately (see 751, note) and for the next decade he shared in countrywide itinerant evangelism, often opening the way for his brother and composing much verse while on horseback. ‘His sermons and his hymns informed each other’ – David Chapman. In 1749 he married Sarah (Sally) Gwynne, settled in Bristol and unlike John became less relentlessly mobile and more firmly Anglican. But at least until 1757 he still continued to travel, attract audiences in their tens of thousands and oversee the growing army of lay preachers and (like Whitefield) labour for harmony between the movement’s leaders. In that year, however, his journal-keeping ended, and his lifestyle was redirected by concern for his wife (who had contracted smallpox), by his own health problems, and by the widening gap between John and himself. The differences arose from John’s elusive ‘perfectionism’ (from 1760), his increasing willingness to distance himself from the CofE, and his autocratic leadership-style.

By common consent, CW is the greatest of all English hymnwriters and certainly the most prolific, completing more than 6000 over 50 years; the exact number depends on whether some poems or single-stanza texts are included. Some self-contained 4-line items are very powerful, and we may regret their neglect today; many are found in his 2000 [sic] Short Hymns on Select Passages of the Holy Scriptures (1760), where even among such jewels the original of our no.862 shines with special brilliance. (The numerous OT ‘enemies’ are often transformed here into inbred or indwelling personal sins; sometimes the distinctive doctrines of freewill or perfectionism show up, and CW uses some bold language about circumcision: ‘cut off the foreskin of my heart’, etc.) Among many other collections, the later 1760s produced many hymns rooted in practical needs, from childbirth and school to family problems and retirement. In 1768 he moved from Bristol to Marylebone in London, mainly for the sake of his family; here he became the main preacher at the City Road Chapel; the classic Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists was compiled by John for publication in 1780; at least 480 of its 525 hymns were by Charles—even though his elder brother thought that he spent too much time writing them. He also played the flute and organ, but the family’s musical talents were to bear greater fruit in his children and (notably) his grandson; see under S S Wesley in the Composers’ index.

J R Watson calls Charles ‘The William Shakespeare of hymnody’; many have dubbed him the poet of the heart—like ‘love’, a frequent climactic word in his verse. The concluding lines of his hymns are just one of many features which mark out his instinctive sureness of touch from the work of lesser contemporaries. While John’s heart (see below) was famously ‘strangely warmed’ in 1738, Charles’s was characteristically ‘set free’. He used an immense variety of metres, many of them original; some of his verse is anti-Calvinist polemic (the innocent-sounding word ‘all’ often flags up his Arminianism, and a general or universal atonement) and he was a master of comic and satirical rhymes. Like Bunyan in the previous century with ‘Giant Pope’ and ‘Giant Pagan’, Wesley consistently shows almost equal scorn for Romanism and Islam—‘superstition’s papal chain…that papal beast’, ‘Mahomet’s imposture…that Arab-thief’. His communion hymns, totalling 166 and leaning on the high-church theology of Daniel Brevint, are rarely found in the same hymnals as his more famous writing on gospel assurance. He loved and used his BCP (drawing richly on its Litany, for example, in Full of trembling expectation) and was clearly a reader of Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the whole Bible (1700) which he frequently versified. His masterly use and application of Scripture, if highly typological, is unparalleled in English hymnwriting. Perhaps his greatest work is the much-anthologised ‘Wrestling Jacob’ (Come, O thou traveller unknown) but the difficulty of finding a tune able to sustain the developing moods of its long narrative and reflection have kept this out of many hymnals including Praise! Far less known is the equally Christ-centred hymn on ‘Dreaming Jacob’, What doth the ladder mean? More often than not, Wesley is the best-represented author in UK hymn-books, as he is also in The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse (1981) with 11 entries from a total of 269 texts, 5 of which are hymns in general use. Of 980 hymns in the 1904 Methodist Hymn Book, 440 are by CW; its 1933 equivalent gives him 243 out of 984. In c1941, Edward Shillito quoted an anonymous Headmaster who said, ‘I hope you will let me advise all would-be hymn-writers to hold their pens until they have carefully studied Charles Wesley’. Like his brother, C Wesley has generated a large volume of other writing; among minor classics are The Evangelical Doctrines of Charles Wesley’s Hymns (J Ernest Rattenbury, 1941), The Hymns of Wesley and Watts (Bernard L Manning, 1942), recent biographies by Arnold Dallimore and Gary Best (respectively A Heart Set Free, 1988, and Charles Wesley: a biography, 2006), and The Handmaid of Piety by Edward Houghton (1992). It is Best’s book which serves as a corrective to much Wesleyan folklore, and most effectively brings Charles out from John’s shadow by giving credit where it is due. See also Carlton R Young’s 1995 anthology Music of the Heart: John and Charles Wesley on Music and Musicians. Meanwhile facsimile edns have been published of his hymns on the Nativity (1st edn 1745), the Lord’s Supper (with John W, also 1745), the Resurrection (1746), Ascension and Whitsuntide (1746) and the Trinity (1767). And while brother John’s career has been the basis of stage plays and musicals, inevitably involving Charles’s story, it is the younger and greater hymnwriter who uniquely prompted David Wright in 2006 to compose The Hymnical, a 2-part musical drama exploring CW’s life, hymns and contemporary relevance. Nos. 142*, 150, 160, 216, 227, 282, 324, 342, 344, 357, 359, 364, 438, 452, 458, 482, 495, 502, 511*, 523, 527, 529, 542, 555, 571, 583, 593, 595, 606, 625, 649, 682, 714, 718, 734, 742, 751, 776, 800, 808, 809, 812, 813, 822, 827, 828, 830, 837, 851, 862, 878*, 889, 940, 966.