Jesus, Lover of my soul

The story of this Charles Wesley classic is full of paradox. Originally headed ‘In Time of Danger and Temptation’, it has itself temptingly provided matter for admiring study by literary critics, confident dissection by psychoanalysts, and strong devotional nourishment by congregations and individual Christians (since it is a ‘my/me’ hymn) for two and half centuries. 100 years ago it was within the popular ‘top 10’; in 1901 Henry Twells could confidently claim it as CW’s most popular hymn. Yet John, the author’s brother, mentor and editor, had strong reservations about its extravagant sentimentality, possibly about its mixed metaphors and certainly about its public use. In spite of John’s strictures against changing hymn-texts (which he himself frequently broke), by 1898 C D Hardcote had noted 157 variations in this one even from his own library; that list would now be far longer. It already included ‘Jesus, refuge of my soul’, used in Bickersteth’s Christian Psalmody (1841).

The original version was written by or before 1740 and published in that year’s Hymns and Sacred Poems, but did not reach a full Methodist collection until 1797. At some stage it shed the stz beginning ‘Wilt thou not regard my call?/ Wilt thou not accept my prayer?’ The paradoxes in the story, however, are pale compared with those in the hymn itself, which spring from the gospel of reverse and substitution. In The Hymns of Wesley and Watts (pp21–23, more generally, pp28–30) Bernard L Manning points to the 2nd half of stz 3, noting ‘the fingerprints of the classical scholar’ in the chiastic (abba doubled) contrasts in these lines; but the author’s skill is spiritual as well as literary, since he is familiar with the realities of such Scriptures as 2 Corinthians 5:21. Most of the chroniclers of hymns have had something to say about this one, among them John Julian, Henry Bett, Erik Routley, Frank Colquhoun (who quotes Wm Gladstone’s fierce criticism), David and Jill Wright, J R Watson, and the compilers of various hymnal companions including that to Hymns and Psalms (1988). James Montgomery called it ‘one of Charles Wesley’s loveliest progeny’; Percy Dearmer, as might be expected, had much to say about the hymn while distancing himself from most of it. The 1953 Companion to Congregational Praise said ‘The debate continues, but the verdict has been given by the universal heart of Christendom.’ This may now be changing—but see below. Wesley, writes Manning, ‘is greatest when he is on the greatest things.’

The first perceived problem comes in the 2nd word. The phrase ‘lover of souls’ occurs in the apocryphal book The Wisdom of Solomon (11.26) and in Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ (3.20), either or both of which could have been Wesley’s source. But the personalising of this to the singular ‘my soul’ is a further step, perhaps prompted by Isaiah 38:17, in both understanding and devotion. Faced with this, with ‘thy bosom’ in line 2, and the (to some) puzzling ‘nearer waters roll’ of line 3 (a phrase from Matthew Prior), it is not surprising that editors have offered a wide variety of options by way of revision in stz 1. Some omit stz 3; nearly all omit the original ‘Wilt thou not regard my call?’—a stz ending with further biblical contrasts, ‘Hoping, against hope I stand;/ dying, and behold I live!’ (Romans 4:18, 2 Corinthians 6:9). Changes here, made not for doctrinal reasons, come at 2.2 (for ‘hangs my helpless soul on thee’), and 4.5–6 (from ‘Thou of life the fountain art,/ freely let me take of thee’.) In debates about the hymn’s content, 3.4 been seen as a weakness since Jesus did far more than simply ‘lead’ the blind. But the master-hymnwriter was not merely stuck for a monosyllable; he probably had Isaiah 42:16 in mind. In 1987 John Lawson traced 66 Scripture texts here, 25 from the Psalms and 13 in stz 2 alone. The hymn has shown enormous resilience beyond all criticism or acclaim; while not occupying quite the place it did once, it would still be a brave editor who ventured to follow John Wesley in omitting it. Even the stories accumulating around its use, of varied levels of authenticity, are a testimony to the power of the hymn itself. See also A Merril Smoak Jr in The Hymn vol.59 no.3 (Summer 2008).

The tunes, too, have provoked some warm debate. For notes on ABERYSTWYTH, a ‘natural’ partner only since about 1900, see 42; LITTLE HEATH was composed for these words but has been more appropriately borrowed by other texts. J B Dykes’ HOLLINGSIDE, the first choice here as often elsewhere, was one of the many enduring marriages of words and music made by the 1861 A&M. After their own marriage, the composer and his wife lived at Hollingside Cottage, in St Oswald’s parish a mile or so outside Durham; it provides an appropriate name for what many consider his finest tune. No tune set to these words can be taken lightly; equally, none should be monotonously dragged. A frequent comment is that the Welsh tune suits larger congregations, the Durham tune, smaller ones. Dr D M Lloyd Jones warned against the common habit of singing lustily but thoughtlessly about sin and unrighteousness.

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.