Still near me, O my Saviour, stand

Since at least 1951 these 3 stzs have been printed and sung as what A&M’s Historical Companion (1962) calls ‘a composite hymn from the Wesleys’ Hymns and Sacred Poems, 1739’. The first stanza is the 4th of 7 in Charles’ Peace, doubting heart—my God’s I am! (not the happiest opening, and now almost extinct); the others are the last two of Jesu, thy boundless love to me— see 844, which comprises the first 4. That hymn is John’s paraphrase from Paulus Gerhardt which appeared in the same year with 16 stzs, reduced to 9 in 1780. He wrote it while in Savannah (therefore ‘pre-conversion’) from the German original in Crüger’s Praxis Pietatis Melica, 1653. If it is asked by what right have several editors agreed on such a textual amalgamation, part of the answer is that the practice is far more common than we sometimes realise, partly that John Wesley himself was chief of the ‘revising editors’, and partly that the combined text has worked well as a congregational hymn for over half a century, certainly better at the present time than any hymns of 9 or 16 very full stzs, however fine. To add to this mixed picture, the Methodist scholar Dr Henry Bett thought that the hymn from which ‘Still nigh me …’ came was by John Wesley rather than Charles.

This version, again in the Wesleyan spirit, ventures to make the 18th-c phrases clearer and more singable for today. Stz 1 had ‘… and guard in fierce temptation’s hour;/ hide in the hollow … / show forth in me … :/ still be thy arms my sure defence;/ nor earth nor hell shall pluck me thence.’ 2.2–3 read ‘… how wondrous things thy love hath wrought!/ Still lead me, lest I go astray …’ The vital and now accepted amendment at 3.4 changes ‘important’ to ‘tremendous’—one of the clearest examples of the altered significance of a single word making such editing vital, and in this case relatively painless.

The tune DAVID’S HARP, formerly known as NORWICH NEW, was set to Miles Smyth’s version of Psalm 101 in Playford’s The Divine Companion of 1701. It was described there as ‘set by Mr Robert King for two voc., cantus & bassus’, which most commentators take to be an ascription of authorship. The Companion to Rejoice and Sing comments: ‘The composer was a noted songwriter of the period and this graceful tune is more in the style of a solo song than a psalm tune’. It remained little known until EH set it to Come, O thou traveller unknown and to 406. Other books then took it up, and Hymns and Psalms (1983) used it 3 times. The subtitle of later editions of Playford’s book was ‘David’s Harp New Tun’d’. The arrangement here is by members of the Praise! music team. (The 1863 Bristol Tune Book called J Daniell’s BROADMEAD, published in 1842, by the name DAVID’S HARP, and other books have sometimes followed suit; this later tune is in LM.)

b Gräfenhainichen, SW of Wittenberg, Germany c1607, d Lübben am Spree, Saxe-Merseburg, 1676. Born to Lutheran parents in an agricultural town, he had many siblings but seems to have been orphaned while quite young. From the age of 15, being proficient in Lat, he attended school at Grimma and from 1628 to c1642 was a student at the Univ of Wittenberg. In 1637 a fire started by Swedish soldiers destroyed his home and all his family records, which has limited our knowledge of his first 30 years, overshadowed as they are with the ‘Thirty Years War’. But for nearly 10 years including some of his happiest, c1643–51, he lived in Berlin where he wrote Gelegenheitsgedichte, 18 items of which his friend J Crüger (qv) included in the Praxis pietatis melica. In 1651, aged 45, he was ordained as provost/pastor at Mittenwalde; he married in 1655 and 2 years later began his pastorate at St Nicholas’ Ch, Berlin. Here the divisions between his own Lutheran faith and the Reformed version became sharper. But in 1666 he was summoned to a consistory court and threatened with deposition; he resigned rather than sign a document supporting the liberal and syncretistic views of the Elector of Brandenburg. In 1668 he was called to Lübben as pastor and archdeacon, where from 1669 he spent his remaining years. The Paul-Gerhardt-Kirche in Lübben has a portrait and a stained glass window depicting him. While remaining firmly Lutheran, his hymns have a rare and deeply personal devotional sweetness not easy to convey in translation; in spite of all its distresses, home means joy, this earth is sweet, heaven is the natural focus and God is above all a Friend. Erik Routley says that with him ‘the truculent note fades; the personal and hopeful note is heard more strongly’, while Catherine Winkworth compares his ‘purest and sweetest expression’ with that of Geo Herbert in England.

His verses range widely in their themes, and while not among the most prolific German hymnwriters, writing some 132 texts, he ranks with the greatest, perhaps second only to Luther. But he was never truly recognised as such in his own day; he simply sang ‘as the bird that sings in the branches’ (Goethe). He adhered to traditional German metrical forms, and Crüger’s successor Johann Georg Ebeling (1637–76) further promoted Gerhardt’s hymns both by setting them to music and by publishing them. They proved surprisingly acceptable to German RC churches, but in translation they were not well-known in England until the mid-19th c, chiefly through Catherine Winkworth (qv) and the versions published by John Kelly (d1890) in 1867. Like the texts of other Germans, not to mention Britons, some of Gerhardt’s ‘flow on for too long, unto they have outgrown their strength’. But Lutherans have prized such hymns as ‘O Jesus Christ,/ thy manger is/ my paradise at which my soul reclineth…’ (1941 trans). Among studies of his life and work, Theodore B Hewitt’s detailed study Paul Gerhardt as a Hymn Writer and his Influence of English Hymnody (Yale and OUP, 1918) is still useful, and lists 31 translators of his work into English up to that time. 9 of these were women, 6 were Americans, and Jn Kelly (who studied at Glasgow and Edinburgh and Bonn) was the most prolific. 9 translations feature in the 2006 Evangelical Lutheran Worship. Since Gerhardt was probably born just 100 years before C Wesley, 2007 saw the 4th centenary of the former and the 3rd of the latter, which were duly celebrated together. Nos.349, 439, 844, 878*.

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.