Lo! He comes with clouds descending

If ever a classic hymn has emerged from the combined work of many hands, this spectacular ‘Advent tableau’, rich in dramatic imagery from the beginning and the end of the Book of Revelation, is it. The downside is that so many versions of the text are now in use, most with their own internal logic and integrity but now impossible to merge into an agreed form of words. PHRW illustrates the problem by trying to address it, and includes a version broadly similar to this one, and (10 hymns earlier) a text closer to John Cennick’s original: ‘Lo! He cometh! countless trumpets/ sound to raise the sleeping dead … / Hallelujah!/ Come, O come! Thou Son of God.’ John Cennick actually wrote (by 1750 when it was first sung by Dublin Moravians; published 1752): ‘Lo! He cometh, countless trumpets/ blow before his bloody sign … Welcome, welcome, bleeding Lamb!’ Dearmer
(who prints it in full in Songs of Praise Discussed) dubbed it ‘this clamorous outburst … intolerable’! Charles Wesley’s text, with a similar theme, metre and language, soon followed in Hymns of Intercession for All Mankind (including enemies and prisoners of war, 1758), long after Cennick had become persona non grata to the Wesleys. This hymn was headed ‘Thy Kingdom Come’; later, ‘The Second Advent’. Martin Madan, in true Wesleyan spirit, then produced his own version in a Collection of 1760, drawing on both the earlier hymns. Julian traces the early history in detail, printing all 3 texts, p681. Methodists have naturally tended to prefer the Wesley version, and he is normally given the chief credit, as here. The 19th c brought further changes, and the 20th many more, seen in various current books. Newton and Bridges are among imitators of this topic and metre, while Wesley himself provided other examples (‘… See the flaming revelation! See the universal blaze!’ etc.)

The eclectic version adopted here may be summarised as, CW stzs 1–3 and 5 (though he used Cennick generally in stz 2) and Cennick stz 4, with these changes: 1.4 for ‘swell the triumph of his train’; 2.2 for ‘dreadful’, 2.3 for ‘those who set at naught …’; 2.5 (repeated) for ‘wailing’; 3.1 for ‘tokens’, 3.5 etc for ‘rapture’, last line for ‘gaze we on’; 4.2 for ‘pomp’, 4.3 for ‘all his saints, by man …’, 4.4 for ‘now shall meet him …’; 5.5 etc for ‘Jah, Jehovah’. Other books including CH use Cennick’s 3rd stz (‘Every island, sea and mountain/ heaven and earth, shall flee away’) and (like CH and GH) choose the Cennick/Madan finale, ‘O come quickly! Hallelujah! Come, Lord, come!’ A&M and HTC have their own major variants. Reflecting King’s Victorian hymnal-count of 1885, in 1891 Julian could write that ‘the Cennick/Wesley cento (Madan’s) is one of the most popular hymns in the English language, and is in extensive use in all English-speaking countries’; even Dearmer (1933) conceded that ‘few hymns are more universal in Anglo-Saxon use than this.’ In view of more recent criticisms, it must be said that stz 2 is no more anti-Semitic than it is anti-Roman; Acts 2:23 and Romans 3:23 implicate us all.

The choice of HELMSLEY as a tune is less disputed; it is named from the N Yorks village near Thirsk where Wesley’s friend Richard Conyers was vicar, and has attracted general acclaim. But its musical origins are far from clear. In his 1765 Select Hymns with Tunes Annext, John Wesley printed an early form as OLIVERS. His sometime co-worker Thomas Olivers said he noted it down after hearing it whistled in a London street, possibly from a concert-room song, ‘Guardian angels now protect us’, or ‘Miss Catley’s hornpipe’. Martin Madan then published it (with its present name) in his Collection of Hymn and Psalm Tunes; this was in 1769, but since it was in one part of a series begun some years before, that form may be the earliest known original. There, as here, it is in G major; other arrangements move it up to A flat or even A. The tune was a favourite of Vaughan Williams, as was the whole hymn for Queen Victoria.

(pronounced ‘Sennick’), b Reading, Berks 1718, d London 1755. Born of staunch Quaker stock, he nevertheless had an Anglican upbringing and trained as a land surveyor. As a young man he was careless and worldly rather than vicious, but when walking along the City of London’s Cheapside he experienced a deep conviction of his sin. For some 3 years this remained unresolved, but through reading George Whitefield’s Journal and hearing of Charles Kinchin’s witness at Oxford, he travelled there in 1739, found Kinchin at Trinity Coll and through him made contact with the Wesleys and Whitefield. His decisive conversion soon followed, and John W made him the first of his official lay preachers, appointing him a schoolmaster at Kingswood, Bristol, where he first preached in the open air. He came to lean more towards the Calvinism of Howell Harris and George Whitefield, opposing Wesley’s perfectionism, and partly for that reason suffered some harsh treatment in the latter’s published Journals. With no proper warning, Jn Wesley publicly expelled him from his ‘Society’ in 1741; Cennick did not go alone, but said later, ‘they saw me weep as I went out’. Unlike Wesley, Cennick accepted some share of the blame; he afterwards joined the Moravians and in 1749 was ordained to ministry as a Deacon in that church. He travelled widely as an evangelist in England, Ireland and Germany, bearing much persecution with the patience characteristic of the early Methodists and their associates. He was the first of them to be dubbed a ‘swaddler’ by an RC cleric who did not realise that ‘swaddling clothes’ was an phrase from the AV Bible.

Among several books he published Sacred Hymns for the Children of God in the Days of their Pilgrimage (1741–42) including his prose testimony and enjoying several edns, and Sacred Hymns for the Use of Religious Societies, generally composed in Dialogue (in 3 parts, 1743–45; the ‘dialogues’ coming mostly at the beginning, and Pt 2 being ‘another little Parcel of Hymns’); then came Hymns for the Honour of Jesus Christ (1754). The second of these included a CM Te Deum in 12 stzs, and O had my soul ten thousand tongues (CM) immediately following And can it be that I should prove the richness of our Saviour’s love (886 886). Better known is, or was, the table-grace, Be present at our table, Lord. His verses are often vivid, sometimes quaint, occasionally sliding from the pedestrian into crudeness or comedy, and usually require editing by later compilers; a short ‘dialogue’ text on ‘The Peace of Christianity’ starts, ‘Ho, pilgrims! (if ye pilgrims be)/ we want to join with you:/ poor Christian travellers are we,/ to Canaan’s land we go’. His italics indicate different voices. These hymns are usually in CM, with the pairs of lines sometimes divided dramatically between men and women; such is ‘Strife in Praise’ where each group rivals the other in claiming its prior duty to praise God! But other interesting, possibly unique, metres are here, and there are hymns for various groups—men, women, younger, older etc; one has stzs respectively for Elders; Labourers, Helpers and Teachers (‘Give them patience with the children dull’); Servants; Widows (not widowers); Married; Single Brethren; Single Sisters (‘who no husband have’); Little Boys and Girls; and Infants. Cennick has 5 entries in GH and 8 in CH; Stevens’ 19th-c Selection also featured at least 8. He wrote 2 introductory stzs to T Ken’s doxology; Routley describes his gifts as ‘those of a miniaturist’. Even today, or perhaps especially today, it is hard to distance oneself far from the man who writes (in Jesus! in thy transporting name), ‘Nor can I like that word, or work,/ that doctrine, book or theme,/ that takes no notice of my Lord/ or leaves out his dear name.’ Nos.511*, 965.

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.