O Lord, who came from realms above

Fire! Not a threat but a cherished gift: although Charles Wesley has written a handful of other texts which have become near-universally known, no hymn of his (which means in effect, no hymn) achieves what this one does. Unlike 714 or 776, it cannot be abridged; unlike 324 or 625, it cannot be rearranged. It has, inevitably, been edited; whether it can fairly be modernised, beginning with the opening 4 words ‘O thou who camest …’, has been a matter of debate among congregations and, before that, of division among editors. Jubilate, however, grasped the nettle, and the version here is that of HTC—whose 2nd edn added this to the small number of hymns printed in both traditional and revised forms. To deal with the changes first: 1.4 was originally ‘on the mean altar …’ (‘mean’ has to go, as in 372 and 386); 3.4, ‘… stir up thy gift in me’ (rhyming with ‘thee’ line 2); and 4.1, ‘Ready for all thy …’ (partly for stress, partly to conform to Romans 12:2). It was John Wesley who changed ‘my sacrifice’ to ‘the …’ in the final line.

But the story of the hymn starts in Leviticus 6:13, where the word of God to Aaron the high priest via Moses requires that ‘The fire shall ever be burning upon the altar; it shall never go out’; that is, the altar of burnt offering. Wesley, characteristically if not uniquely, saw that as both symbolic and prophetic, and in the enormous book Short Hymns on Select Passages of the Holy Scriptures (1762) published this versified elaboration of his text with NT enrichment. The list of Scriptures includes (in order) John 3:31, Luke 12:49, Romans 10:1, 2 Timothy 1:6, 1 Thessalonians 1:3, Philippians 2:17 and 2 Timothy 4:6. The 1780 book, which had ‘humble love’ at 2.4, set it in LM, replacing the original LMD. A final extraordinary survival is the 6-syllable (hexasyllabic?) word ‘inextinguishable’ in the stz 2, as rare, memorable and vital to the sense as it is testing to sing.Some editors have revised the line (e.g. ‘Unquenched, undimmed in darkest days’ – 1897); Songs of Praise (1925, 1931) cut the knot by leaving out the stz. But Elizabeth Cosnett claimed in 2007 that the word was a key to the whole hymn; ultimately nothing can halt the work of God (cf Acts 28:31?).

The Hildebrandt/Beckerlegge edition of 1983 suggests allusions to the poetry of Young, Blackmore and Pope, the prose of Luther and Cranmer, and the place this hymn held in the heart and teaching of John, the author’s brother. The H/B Appendix (p733) lists a total of 26 biblical quotations in these 16 lines. Even if some of these are remote, coincidental or both, the hymn remains an integrated and (for Wesley) brief masterpiece about which much more could be written, and has been, by Wesley specialists as by students of hymns.

J R Watson’s comment (The English Hymn, 1997, p231) applies to many of Wesley’s texts, but to none more than this to which it is directed: ‘The deft interweaving of phrases is virtuoso work, not only because it combines phrases with a remarkable versatility from a wide range, but also because it fits them so beautifully into the lines and verse forms.’ That is his ‘art’, which is never for its own sake but always put to the service of Christ and his people. Although the hymn is clearly for all Christians to sing, it may have a special pointedness for preachers of the gospel, now as then. If the celestial fire truly burned within our churches, we should all no doubt appreciate the joy of discovering tunes other than the one we tend to grow up with and stick to. For some, anything other than S S Wesley’s HEREFORD (271) has been scarcely thinkable since 1904 when these words and music were first matched; others may be amazed to find there is any alternative to WILTON as chosen here. Each has its own merits and enrichments of the text; if anything, Samuel Stanley’s tune almost requires some adaptation of the words, as here, if they are to be sung clearly and intelligently. He was the first to choose a name which two other composers also use, and could also claim an earlier association with this hymn, in the 1877 Wesley’s Hymns. The tune itself was published in Birmingham c1802, in Twenty-four Tunes in four parts, composed chiefly to Dr Watts’ Psalms and Hymns. The ‘Wilton’ named is taken to be the small town W of Salisbury, but its link with the tune is not known.

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.