Hark! The herald angels sing

For Christmas 1738, John and Charles Wesley were in London. Sermons and joyful sacraments at Islington, crowds to hear the ‘glad tidings’ in Whitechapel, then the New Year love feast at Fetter Lane (between Fleet St and Holborn)—their Journals are brimful of prayer, praise, joy, and evangelism. This must surely have been the setting in which Charles produced one of the great hymns of the Christian faith, published the following year in Hymns and Sacred Poems. He was so pleased with some of the lines that he used them in other hymns (eg Now in praise let us arise, PHRW211); he did this elsewhere, but these are so familiar that we immediately notice them in another context. Ironically for the brothers who would allow nothing to be changed, it is a much-altered version which has come to be acclaimed as the indispensable hymn for the occasion; since 1918, for most of the 20th c and into the 21st , it has been the climax to the King’s College Cambridge carol service, now heard by millions worldwide. So sometimes second thoughts and alterations seem to work! Julian counted it among the top 4 hymns; Percy Dearmer (in 1933) called it ‘perhaps the most popular English hymn in the world’. As with 357, not its least merit is the use of controlled repetition, as in stz 3; Bernard L Manning commends this Wesleyan gift: ‘Nothing is weaker than repetition weakly done. Nothing is stronger than repetition strongly done. In Wesley’s jubilation we discern the dignity and the reverence due to the Son of God.’

But Wesley wrote ‘Hark, how all the welkin rings,/ Glory to the King of kings!’ (there was even a misprint in line 2 on its first appearance!) in ten 4- line stzs. The frequent ascription to CW ‘and others’ is a hint of the part played among these others by George Whitefield and Martin Madan. In 1753, the former ventured to omit stzs 8 and 10 (which have never resurfaced in hymn-books exactly as written), and recast the rest in their now familiar shape. In 1760, the latter rewrote the closing couplet of stz 1, from ‘Universal nature say,/ Christ the Lord is born today’. Another milestone came in 1782, when a new edition of ‘Tate and Brady’ featured the hymn as three 8-line stzs, for the first time repeating the opening couplet after each one. Since then, some books have tried to recapture some of the original; although ‘welkin’ (sky) has gone for good, among hymnals providing four stzs are the Anglican Hymn Book 1965, Christian Worship 1976, CH, the New English Hymnal 1986, and PHRW. More recent changes have involved debates by many committees over 2.7 (‘pleased as Man with man …’) and 3.6 (‘Born that man no more may die’). For some, ‘us’ seems weaker; for others, to persist with ‘man/men’ would be unacceptably insensitive. The smaller differences are hardly noticed in the singing, and cannot detract from the effect of the hymn. A late-19th-c hymn-book survey (by James King) showed that no hymn was printed more often than this; the position has not changed greatly more than a century later. In Cotterill’s Selection… (5th edn) it appears as no.1, in four 4-line stzs. For Christmas 2004 a secular recording briefly featured in the pop music charts. This hymn is the Christmas favourite for both Noël Tredinnick and Christopher Idle.

Wesley, of course, never heard the tune which some call BERLIN (a name also given to a different Mendelssohn tune) but which most of us now know as MENDELSSOHN, named after its composer. It was first heard in 1840 at Leipzig, as a ‘Festgesang’ at the festival for which it was composed and which was held to celebrate 4 centuries of printing since Johannes Gutenberg. There it was arranged for male voices and brass instruments; the composer later suggested to his English publishers that it needed some new words—so long as they were not sacred! ‘There must be a national and merry subject found’ he wrote ‘… and the words must express something popular, as the music tries to do it.’ In 1855–6 William H Cummings (Prof of Singing at the Royal Academy of Music) wrote out an adapted arrangement, first sung at Waltham Abbey where he was organist. Richard Chope was the first to publish it with these words, with the name ST VINCENT. Others called it BETHLEHEM but, as often, it was the 1861 A&M which both cemented the relationship and gave the tune its present name. David and Jill Wright suggest that the repeated notes beginning lines 5, 6 and 7 ‘could possibly suggest the sound of a printing press’, and that the words at 4.6 are also appropriate to the tune’s origins.

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.