O for a thousand tongues to sing

‘Had I a thousand tongues’, said the Wesleys’ Moravian friend and onetime mentor Peter Böhler, ‘I would praise God with them all!’ More has been written about this classic ‘Methodist number 1’ than about most hymns—the opening item in all main Methodist hymnals from 1780 until the 1983 Hymns and Psalms; also no.1 in Hymns of Faith, 1964. Charles Wesley’s magnificently memorable lines must nevertheless not conceal the great variety in which they appear in various books, including the selection and order of stzs and the (re)phrasing of individual lines—nor the fact that it was one of the writer’s many Arminian manifestoes, which Reformed editors have dealt with in many ways short of omitting the hymn altogether. In 1989 the N American United Methodist Hymnal made a strong theological statement by printing (after a full historical note) three separate versions: a traditional 7-stz selection, a nearly-complete 17-stz text, close to the original, and 7 stzs in Spanish, Mil voces para celebrar. The 5 stzs chosen here—still a substantial hymn when sung to its favourite tune—are at least almost uncontroversial, the only changes being the widely accepted use of ‘great’ for ‘dear’ in line 2 (altered by John W in 1778), and ‘calms’ for ‘charms’ in stz 2. ‘He leaps about his Bible in joyous excitement, in imperatives and exclamations corresponding to his own career’ – J R Watson.

The original hymn of 18 stzs began ‘Glory to God, and praise and love’, and ended ‘With me, your Chief, you then shall know,/ shall feel your sins forgiven;/ anticipate your heaven below/ and own that love is heaven’; (‘Chief’ as in ‘chief of sinners’, 1 Timothy 1:15). John Wesley chose 9 stzs for the 1780 Collection, beginning with 7, ‘O for a thousand …’, as Richard Conyers had done in his 1767 Psalms and Hymns. Praise! has the stzs originally numbered 7, 9, 10, 11 (absent in 780) and 8. Many non-Methodist books end with ‘My gracious Master …’ in order to make a worthy conclusion. Reformed ones omit some lines which JW omitted (‘… his soul was once an offering made/ for every soul of man’, stz 14) and some he included (‘Murtherers, and all ye hellish crew,/ ye sons of lust and pride,/ believe the Saviour died for you …’, stz 16). A different problem is encountered with the more familiar stz 12: ‘Hear him, ye deaf, his praise, ye dumb,/ your loosened tongues employ,/ ye blind, behold your Saviour come,/ and leap, ye lame, for joy.’ Sad though it is to lose these dramatic and biblical lines, people who have such physical disabilities (as are here spiritualised) often feel demeaned by being lumped together as ‘the deaf’ (etc), let alone ‘ye deaf’ or ‘you deaf’. ‘Dumb’ has its own problems, which some recent Bible translations avoid by sing ‘mute’. This is not so much a matter of so-called ‘political correctness’ as Christian courtesy; unhelpful language partly fosters, and partly springs from, unloving attitudes. Although some American and other revisions try to rewrite this stz in more gracious ways which the present editors considered along with their own amendments, the results have proved neither acceptable to those with such disabilities, nor poetically worthy of their famous context. Rather than try to adapt 18th-c language here, hymnals may need to look for new writing with the same aim.

Perhaps more important, in 1780 the hymn introduced the section ‘Exhorting and Beseeching to return to God’, but in 1739 was ‘For the Anniversary Day of one’s conversion’—as reflected in the original stzs 2–6. This assumes that those who sing it are converted, that they can date the event as clearly as the Wesleys could, and that they wish to celebrate it annually and use it evangelistically. It also probably dates the hymn at or near 21 May 1739; as some have observed, ‘the question-mark has now gone’—that is, from the earlier 751. It was published the following year in Hymns and Sacred Poems. Interestingly, the great hymnwriter who launched such metrical variety achieved what many see as his greatest triumph by using Common Metre.

The Methodist Hymns and Psalms prints 3 tunes with these words—none of which is LYNGHAM! By popular acclaim and expectation this came to be the ‘proper’ tune, while being avoided by many standard books in favour of LYDIA (625, with fewer repeats), or the non-repeating RICHMOND (838) or UNIVERSITY (very different, 650=969). Some American books prefer Carl Glaser’s 1828 melody AZMON. LYNGHAM, often seen as a flamboyantly repetitive Methodist tune, was actually the work of a baptist, Thomas Jarman. He called it NATIVITY (a name which Lahee’s tune, at 300, has effectively taken over) and published it in Sacred Music, 1803, to While shepherds watched (379). Some recent hymn-books attempt to continue or revive this association while others keep the tune for Come, let us join our cheerful songs (300—a curious linkage of name?), but so far they seem to be fighting a losing battle against congregational choice. Like its companion SAGINA (776) its flourishes make it an unlikely candidate for appropriation, even temporarily, by any new words. Wesley Milgate advises ‘Sing it lightly but with vigour and rhythmic urgency’; Linda Mawson’s arrangement was made for this book. The name remains unexplained.

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.