Part 11

They may be readily divided into two classes, the one vigorous and often bitterly satirical onslaughts upon the Calvinistic position, which are more in the style of ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ than in that of ‘Jesu, Lover of my soul,’ the other containing the proclamation of the glad tidings of universal redemption. Both elements are often found in the same composition. This is true of the first of the hymns, a portion of which has been used in Methodist congregations for more than a century and a half, and retains its place in the new hymn-book. I print some verses with the original italics, indicating its polemic purpose.

Father, _whose everlasting love_ Thy only Son for sinners gave; Whose grace to _all_ did _freely_ move, And sent Him down a _world to save_.

Help us Thy mercy to extol Immense, unfathomed, unconfined; To praise the Lamb who _died for all_, The _general Saviour of mankind_.

Thy _undistinguishing regard_ Was cast on _Adam’s_ fallen race: For all Thou hast in Christ prepared, _Sufficient, sovereign, saving_ grace.

Jesus hath said, we _all_ shall hope, Preventing grace for all is free: And I, if I be lifted up, I will _draw all men_ unto Me.

Arise, O God, maintain Thy cause! The fulness of the _Gentiles_ call: Lift up the standard of Thy cross And _all_ shall own Thou diedst for all.[132]

In other hymns he employs the most biting, taunting sarcasm. It is difficult to suppose that these were ever sung even in the thickest of the fight; but they were sown broadcast (price fourpence), and were, no doubt, read with ecstatic delight by those who were on the Wesleys’ side in the great controversy. It is easy at this distance of time and circumstance to condemn the vehemence of the language used on both sides, especially in the later and more acrimonious stages of the controversy. But this was one of ‘freedom’s battles.’ It was magnificent, and it was war. To the Wesleys the doctrine that by the arbitrary decree of God—the God of love!—children were born to a doom which they could neither escape nor deserve was hateful, blasphemous, impossible. If _this_ were indeed the truth of God, what gospel was there to preach? Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die and meet the inevitable doom. Nor could they tolerate what seemed to them the smug satisfaction of ‘the elect,’ to whose certainty of salvation the equal certainty of the damnation of the reprobate added a pleasing flavour. They would not accept salvation on such terms. ‘Take back,’ Charles Wesley cries indignantly,

Take back my interest in Thy blood, Unless it streamed for all the race.

With a true controversial instinct, the Wesleys fastened upon Calvin’s phrase ‘_decretum horribile_,’ and, preferring to transliterate rather than to translate, turned again and again to rend it.

A poem describing the possibilities of evil in the human heart and mind comes to a climax thus—

I could the devil’s law receive, Unless restrained by Thee; I could (good God!) I could believe The Horrible Decree.

I could believe that God is hate— The God of love and grace Did damn, pass by, and reprobate The most of human race.

Farther than this I cannot go, Till Tophet take me in. But, O, forbid that I should know This mystery of sin.[133]

Such were the amenities of religious controversy in the eighteenth century!

Again, in a lighter but still intensely earnest vein, he caricatures his adversaries’ teaching—

The righteous God consigned Them over to their doom, And sent the Saviour of mankind To damn them from the womb: To damn for falling short Of what they could not do, For not believing the report Of that which was not true.

He did not do the deed— (Some have more mildly raved), He did not damn them, but decreed They never should be saved.

This effusion ends in a higher strain, with a dedication of his own life to the proclamation of universal redemption—

My life I here present, My heart’s last drop of blood; O let it all be freely spent In proof that Thou art good: Art good to all that breathe, Who all may pardon have: Thou willest not the sinner’s death, But all the world _wouldst_ save.

John Wesley tried in his brief tract on the _Calvinistic Controversy_[134] (1743) to make peace with Whitefield, and some of his concessions are surprising—indeed, he afterwards retracted them. But Charles, who at this time was in the full glow of his early evangelistic triumphs, and who was much less of a theologian than his brother, felt that he was engaged in a holy crusade. He tried to write calmly, he prayed for grace to speak tenderly of those who were erring from the truth he held so dear, but—well, he could not keep silence.

In one of these hymns—a portion of which remains in the _Methodist Hymn-book_—he prays—

O arm me with the mind, Meek Lamb! that was in Thee, And let my knowing zeal be joined To fervent charity.

With calm and tempered zeal Let me enforce Thy call, And vindicate Thy gracious will, Which offers life to all.

Thou dost not stand in need Of me to prop Thy cause, To assert Thy general grace, or spread The victory of Thy cross.

O may I love like Thee! And in Thy footsteps tread! Thou hatest all iniquity, But nothing Thou hast made.

O may I learn Thy art, With meekness to reprove; To hate the sin with all my heart, But still the sinner love.[135]

These verses might be headed ‘A Prayer before Controversy,’ but it is a shock to the reader on turning the page to find that the next verse shows how soon he descended from this high level.

The controversy was renewed thirty years later with vastly greater bitterness, and with much more personal feeling.

John Fletcher parted in 1771 from his Trevecca students like the saint he was, for he could no longer hold his place when other Arminians were discharged. ‘I cannot give up the possibility of the salvation of all any more than I can give up the truth and love of God.... I left them all in peace, the servant, but no more the president of the college.’[136]

The love of Whitefield and the Wesleys was of the kind which many waters cannot quench; but when Madan, Romaine, Hervey, and Rowland Hill heaped upon John Wesley’s venerable head torrents of vulgar abuse—abuse absolutely impossible, inconceivable in our milder mannered age[137]—Charles felt that there was a point beyond which even Christian charity could not decently go. His refusal to write Hervey’s epitaph is worthy of a Christian gentleman:

Let Madan or Romaine record his praise, Enough that Wesley’s brother can forgive.

The flowing tide, however, was with the Methodists, and though the fight was long, and the victory was not wholly won in their day, these hymns rendered an inestimable service to the cause of religious freedom. It may be true that they represented Calvin’s teaching one-sidedly, and at times misrepresented it, but it cannot be denied that they pictured current Calvinistic teaching accurately enough. The Wesleys saw clearly that, should belief in a limited redemption spread in their Society, they would but labour in vain and spend their strength for nought. They might have gathered little coteries of devout folk, strongly tinctured with what we now call Plymouth Brethrenism, but they could never have founded a great Church, whose chiefest glory should be its missionary enterprise both at home and in the ends of the earth. The mission of Thomas Coke more than a hundred years ago, the great city missions of our own time, the work of William Booth, of Hugh Price Hughes, and Samuel F. Collier, would have been impossible had they not been able to say anywhere and to all—

Sent by my Lord, on you I call; The invitation is to all: Come, all the world; come, sinner, thou; All things in Christ are ready now!

The Wesleys reached their doctrine of general redemption by two paths. In the first place, they had been trained in the school of Arminius and of Laud, and had been confirmed in the faith by their own careful study of God’s word. But it is abundantly evident that their own experience had led them to believe in the infinite mercy of God. Charles Wesley, especially, argued with the profound humility of the sincere penitent, that his own salvation, of which he had received the undeniable assurance, ‘the indubitable seal,’ on Whit-Sunday, 1738, was itself convincing evidence of the good tidings he proclaimed.

Thy sovereign grace to all extends, Immense and unconfined: From age to age it never ends; It reaches all mankind.

Throughout the world its breadth is known, Wide as infinity; So wide, it never passed by one, Or it had passed by me.[138]

This is a note which constantly recurs in the _Hymns on God’s Everlasting Love_—sometimes expressed quaintly and unpoetically, sometimes with a pathos truly sublime, as in these verses—

O let me kiss Thy bleeding feet, And bathe and wash them with my tears; The story of Thy love repeat In every drooping sinner’s ears, That all may hear the quickening sound, Since I, even I, have mercy found.

O let Thy love my heart constrain, Thy love for every sinner free; That every fallen soul of man May taste the grace that found out me; That all mankind, with me, may prove Thy sovereign, everlasting love.[139]

In this, as in other respects, the Wesleyan theology was characteristically Pauline. ‘This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all men to be received that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the chief.’

Hymns of this class have an important place in the story of the Methodist Revival, as well as in the Calvinistic controversy. The vehemence, the violence, with which the Wesleys asserted their doctrine was largely, if not entirely, due to their sense of what it meant to the vast crowds of neglected, ignorant, savage folk who listened with amazement to the messengers who proclaimed God’s love to them.

Sinners, believe the gospel word, Jesus is come your souls to save! Jesus is come, your common Lord; Pardon ye all in Him may have, May now be saved, whoever will; This Man receiveth sinners still.

See where the lame, the halt, the blind. The deaf, the dumb, the sick, the poor, Flock to the Friend of human kind, And freely all accept their cure; To whom doth He His help deny? Whom in His days of flesh pass by?[140]

And again—

O unexampled Love, O all-redeeming Grace! How freely didst Thou move To save a fallen race! What shall I do to make it known What Thou for all mankind hast done?

O for a trumpet voice, On all the world to call! To bid their hearts rejoice In Him who died for all; For all my Lord was crucified, For all, for all my Saviour died![141]

This was a new voice crying in the wilderness of dull religious mediocrity or of self-satisfied religious devotion, it was the clarion-cry of one that brought good tidings to the outcasts of Israel.

4. Hymns of the Methodist Evangel

From the first the Methodists made their own experience the starting-point of their preaching. John Wesley desired no help from any who had not ‘the witness in himself.’ His itinerants must set to their seal that God is true. ‘We are witnesses of these things, and so is also the Holy Ghost.’ This personal element, the testimony of the man who believed and therefore spoke, differentiated at once Methodist preaching from the cold impersonal moral essays of the parish church. But Methodist preaching would not have been what it was had John Wesley’s sermons rather than Charles Wesley’s hymns represented Methodism to the masses. John Wesley’s keen intellect held his deep religious fervour in check, but Charles took full advantage of the poet’s licence to say what was in his heart without reserve and without modifying explanations.

His hymns of invitation strike a new note. There is nothing to compare with them in earlier hymn-writers, and comparatively little in later. They are the battle-songs of an open-air preacher, and are borne on the wings of the tempest that raged around the heroic little poet as he faced cheerily the rage or ridicule of the mob. His metres are bright and lilting, winning the ear of the simple and arresting the casual passer-by.

The mercy I feel To others I show, I set to my seal That Jesus is true: Ye all may find favour Who come at His call, O come to my Saviour, His grace is for all!

O let me commend My Saviour to you, The publican’s Friend And Advocate too, For you He is pleading His merits and death, With God interceding For sinners beneath.

And again—

O all that pass by, To Jesus draw near; He utters a cry, Ye sinners, give ear! From hell to retrieve you, He spreads out His hands; Now, now to receive you, He graciously stands.

Only a preacher, perhaps only an open-air preacher, could have written such hymns. They are not hymns of the oratory, of the class-room, or the village church; but of that vast cathedral whose roof is the blue vault of heaven; they are songs of Moorfields, of Kingswood, of Newcastle, and of Gwennap. Perhaps of all Wesley’s hymns these are the most characteristically Methodist. Comparatively few are to be found even yet in any but Methodist books, but in them they hold an unchallenged place, and belong to the whole Methodist family, which has had many a quarrel in Conference, has been many a time by schisms rent asunder, but has never faltered in its loyal and steadfast proclamation of the message of God’s everlasting love.

As a general rule each revision of a Nonconformist hymn-book renders it less distinctive of the denomination it represents, and this is, to some extent, true of the new Methodist hymn-book. It has lost the section with which Wesley’s book opened, ‘Exhorting and Entreating to Return to God,’ but it retains almost all the hymns. Modern writers have seldom succeeded in hymns of this type. A few, however, rank with the best of Charles Wesley’s, who himself never struck a note of yearning sympathy for the erring more true and tender than Faber in his ‘Come to Jesus.’

Souls of men! why will ye scatter Like a crowd of frightened sheep? Foolish hearts! why will ye wander From a love so true and deep?

It is not one of the best signs of the times that hymns of invitation are now for the most part provided by American singers and are of the ephemeral class.

Faber’s exquisite lines, set side by side with such a hymn as Wesley’s

Ye neighbours and friends Of Jesus, draw near,

well illustrate the difference between the cheery, hopeful, out-door evangel of the Wesleys and the subdued earnestness of the pleading of the modern Catholic or Anglo-Catholic missioner. I do not suggest that the comparison is to the advantage or disadvantage of either, but only indicate the difference of the tone of the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century mission hymns. In our day evangelism has lost much of its novelty, and men are less hopeful than they were of the world’s conversion. To the first Methodists it seemed as though any triumph was possible to such a gospel as theirs, and their battle-songs were all songs of victory.

Wesley’s hymns enshrine the history as well as the doctrines of Methodism, and few studies in Methodist hymnology are more interesting than that of the geography of the hymn-book. As to the local setting of ‘Lo! on a narrow neck of land’ there has been much controversy, but it undoubtedly belongs to Jekyl Island, and not to the Land’s End. Charles Wesley wrote to Lady Oglethorpe from Jekyl Island in 1736—

‘Last evening I wandered to the north end of the island, and stood upon the narrow point which your ladyship will recall as there projecting into the ocean. The vastness of the watery waste, as compared with my standing place, called to mind the briefness of human life and the immensity of its consequences, and my surroundings inspired me to write the enclosed hymn, beginning

Lo! on a narrow neck of land, ’Twixt two unbounded seas I stand—

which, I trust, may pleasure your ladyship, weak and feeble as it is when compared with the songs of the sweet psalmist of Israel.’[142]

He did write a hymn at the Land’s End, but it is of quite a different type. It might have been written for St. Augustine of Canterbury on his landing at Ebbsfleet.

Come, Divine Immanuel, come, Take possession of Thy home, Now Thy mercy’s wings expand, Stretch throughout the happy land.[143]

The popular hymn

See how great a flame aspires, Kindled by a spark of grace! Jesu’s love the nations fires, Sets the kingdoms on a blaze—

tells of victory at Newcastle-on-Tyne.

Glory to God, whose sovereign grace Hath animated senseless stones;[144]

tells of triumph at Kingswood, whilst—

Worship, and thanks, and blessing, And strength ascribe to Jesus!

is reminiscent of mobs at Walsall and Devizes.

5. Hymns of the Methodist Society

The duty of a Methodist preacher was not simply to sow good seed broadcast, but to gather those who received the word into Societies, where they could be taught, trained, watched over. A large part of John Wesley’s itinerations were for the purpose of confirming and sifting the Societies. In many cases they might be described as Charles Wesley, who had an eye for the humorous side of people and things, describes the Newcastle converts, ‘a wild, loving, staring Society.’ But the converts who remained steadfast were soon led to an intelligent faith and a life of devotion such as is possible only to those who are taught by educated men or their pupils. The debt Methodism owes to Oxford culture is inestimable. The Wesleys were never discouraged by the ignorance of their hearers, but they were never content with it. They had profound faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as a teacher, and prayed, like St. Paul for his simple-minded converts at Philippi, that love might abound in good sense and good taste.[145]

Him Prophet, and King, And Priest we proclaim, We triumph and sing Of Jesus’s name; Poor idiots[146] He teaches To show forth His praise, And tell of the riches Of Jesus’s grace.

No matter how dull The scholar whom He Takes into His school, And gives him to see; A wonderful fashion Of teaching He hath, And wise to salvation He makes us through faith.

To a generation brought up to regard Sankey’s _Songs and Solos_ as the best possible hymns for mission-halls and open-air services, a study of Wesley’s hymns is a liberal education. For the most ignorant of the converts the hymns were the one and only means of culture. They could not read, much of the preaching must have been beyond their comprehension, but the hymns, read slowly, a line at a time, soon became familiar, and the favourite hymns sung over and over again in the house, the class-room, and the family circle, became a part of their very life. Methodist biography shows how the life and death of the saints has been cheered and sanctified by these spiritual songs.

The most important, and by far the largest, part of Wesley’s _Collection_ was devoted to hymns of the Christian life.

It is divided into sections: For Believers Rejoicing, Fighting, Praying, Watching, Working, Suffering, Seeking for Full Redemption, Saved, Interceding for the World. It begins with his own translation of Johann Andreas Rothe’s great hymn

Now I have found the ground wherein Sure my soul’s anchor may remain, The wounds of Jesus, for my sin, Before the world’s foundation slain; Whose mercy shall unshaken stay, When heaven and earth are fled away

This is followed by his version of Zinzendorf’s hymn

Jesu, Thy blood and righteousness My beauty are, my glorious dress.

After these Moravian hymns are a number of Charles Wesley’s, which celebrate the joys of believers, for ‘How should not he be glad, whom the glad tidings have reached?’[147] It is often difficult to understand John Wesley’s principle of classification, but in this section almost every hymn of the seventy-five is obviously well placed under the title ‘For Believers Rejoicing.’ The notes of thanksgiving are very varied, from the calm confidence of ‘Now I have found the ground’ to the simple songs written for him ‘that in God is merry,’ such as

O what shall I do My Saviour to praise, So faithful and true, So plenteous in grace, So strong to deliver, So good to redeem The weakest believer That hangs upon Him!

and

My God, I am Thine, What a comfort divine, What a blessing to know That my Jesus is mine!

We cannot claim for these hymns that they introduce new songs to the Christian choir. Joy and gladness are common to all who have found salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. Isaac Watts, Philip Doddridge, F. W. Faber, Frances Ridley Havergal, and many more have had ‘the high praises of God in their mouth.’ From the days of the Hebrew psalmists until now the sense of infinite content which comes with the peace which passeth all understanding has been the theme of God’s singers. ‘He satisfieth the longing soul and filleth the hungry soul with goodness.’ Yet joyousness is a special characteristic of Methodist hymns, and especially of those which were written in the early days of the triumphs of the itinerant preachers. No hymns rise higher in their exultant rapture, none are more tenderly triumphant than the songs of Charles Wesley.

His Birthday hymn exhibits the happy enthusiasm of his evangelism.

My remnant of days I spend in His praise, Who died the whole world to redeem; Be they many or few, My days are His due, And they all are devoted to Him.

In other hymns he expresses the same joy in living in calmer tones.

The winter’s night and summer’s day Glide imperceptibly away, Too short to sing Thy praise; Too few we find the happy hours, And haste to join those heavenly powers, In everlasting lays.

Bright and inspiring as these pieces are, they are in striking contrast with the hymns characteristic of minor religious movements, and justify John Wesley’s claim that ‘in these hymns is no doggerel.’ That they are of unequal merit goes without saying, but it is remarkable how many of them are living hymns to-day. Religious feeling is no more healthy because it loves to pray for guidance ‘amid the encircling gloom,’ or to describe the hosts of the Church militant as ‘pilgrims of the night.’ A ‘sober standard of feeling’ must take into account that the darkness has passed and the true light now shineth.