THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE HYMNS OF THE WESLEYS

TIMOTHY L. SMITH

(All rights reserved to author)

John and Charles Wesley were the leaders of a spiritual awakening in England that during its first decade, from 1738 to 1747, gave structure to Methodist theology and awakened Christendom to the promise of the sanctifying Spirit. Both the Wesleys were thoughtful and compassionate preachers. Both were also fine poets and singers. Along with scores of sermons, essays and tracts, they wrote and published together during those ten years a series of volumes entitled Hymns and Sacred Poems. In these, they hoped to teach the people through singing the scriptural promises of hallowing grace.

In 1746, the two brothers published a slim volume for Pentecost Sunday called Hymns of Petition and Thanksgiving for the Promise of the Father. The title was drawn from Jesus' words to the eleven apostles, "Behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you," recorded in Luke 24:49, and in Acts 1:4. In each of the thirty-two hymns the theme of the old covenant's promise of the new, fulfilled in the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost, was interwoven with biblical teachings about the righteousness that flows from faith. These teachings were drawn from St. Paul and other New Testament writers as well as from Moses, the prophets, and the Hebrew psalms, whose theology Jesus had expounded to the eleven on the evening of Easter Day. The texts for the Pentecost poems themselves, however, were taken from John 7:37-39, and John 14-17. In these passages Jesus had promised and prayed the Father to send the Holy Spirit to comfort and sanctify those who knew Him, trusted Him, loved and obeyed Him.1

Clearly, John and Charles Wesley meant these hymns on the promise of the Spirit to teach biblical theology, and to do it more effectively because the people sang in joy what they were being taught. Where in all Christian literature appears a lovelier description of the way God's "Spirit of grace" brings sinners to contrition, than in the following lines:

Thou dost the first good thought inspire;

The first faint spark of pure desire

Is kindled by Thy gracious breath;

By Thee made conscious of his fall,

The sinner hears Thy sudden call,

And starts out of the sleep of death.2

Another hymn exhorted,

Sinners, lift up your hearts,

The Promise to receive,

Jesus Himself imparts,

He comes in man to live;

The Holy Ghost to man is given;

Rejoice in God sent down from heaven.

Here was manifest the central theme of the Wesleyan revival, on which John Wesley and George Whitefield never disagreed: the gift of the lifegiving presence of the Spirit of Christ in the experience of the new birth.3

In the majestic series of six poems on Jesus' words, "When he [the Holy Spirit] is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment [John 16:8]," the authors declared all the work of the hallowing Comforter. He convicts unbelievers, including the so-called "Christian world," of sin. In pardoning love He brings them "the righteousness of faith," in which "grace doth more than sin abound." After that moment of forgiving grace, there comes by faith another: the same Holy Spirit sets up in the hearts of true Christians:

. . . the everlasting throne,

The inward kingdom from above,

The glorious power of perfect love.4

The first of these six poems began with the prayer,

Come, and baptize the world with fire.

These two lines summarized the whole work of redemption, beginning with the decisive events of conviction, conversion, and inward sanctification. The Wesleys believed those events were central to the lifelong process by which God renews in His children the image of His holiness and love. The message of the hymn widens to include at last, in both judgment and glory, all of humanity. The series ended on a note of hope:

Thy great millennial reign begin,

That every ransom'd child of man,

That every soul may bow the knee

And rise, to reign with God in Thee.5

The doctrine of a "second benefit" of purity and perfect love-the promise that the Holy Spirit whom we receive in the new birth as a "guest" would "in our heart abide"-was central in these Pentecost hymns, especially the half-dozen based on John 14.6 Hence such lines as the promise,

Who Jesus' word obeys,

And keeps His kind command,

Communion closer still shall know

And dwell with God in Him below, . . .

and the prayer,

The length and breadth of love reveal,

The height and depth of Deity,

And all the sons of glory seal

And change, and make us all like Thee.7

By this point in Wesleyan history, however, the doctrine of a second moment of inwardly sanctifying grace, following the first one, the new birth, scarcely needed elaboration. Wesley's last Oxford sermon, preached August 24, 1744, was on "Scriptural Christianity," that is, the Christianity of the church of Pentecost. It was the last he preached there because the officers of the University would not bear the evangelist'sinsistent question whether they were filled with the Holy Spirit. Wesley had declared the sermon's text, Acts 4:31, implied all Christians should seek this grace. Moreover, in the same year as the publication of these Pentecost hymns, the first volume of John Wesley's Sermons on Several Occasions appeared. It contained such discourses as the one called "The First-Fruits of the Spirit," which expounded the distinction he believed Romans 8 sustained between the sanctification begun in regeneration and that made inwardly complete by the fulfillment of the promise, "the God of peace sanctify you wholly."9 The previous year, his Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion demolished the critics who had argued that "Christians are not now to receive the Holy Ghost." Although the long essay muted his teaching of two moments of hallowing grace, Wesley recited the doctrines prayers, and homilies of the Church of England and the writings of the Early Church Fathers to support his argument that the Comforter whom Jesus had promised after the Last Supper would, in the Master's words, abide with His disciples "forever."10

Indeed, the forming of these poems into prayers, to be prayed in song by earnest Methodists asking for the apostles' grace at Pentecost, would have been absurd if the authors had believed that on that day the outpouring of the Holy Spirit triggered some dispensational mechanism guaranteeing that thereafter all believers would experience in the hour of their justifying faith the fullness of the Holy Spirit.11 If that is the teaching of Scripture, Wesley was mistaken. Likewise mistaken were all those Christian thinkers from the Church Fathers onward who identified Pentecost with confirmation, not baptism, and who seem never to have been able to think of being baptized or filled with the Spirit except as a crucial event in the spiritual pilgrimage begun when they were born of the Spirit to new life in Christ.

The doctrine Wesley thought scriptural appears most winsomely here in the great hymn of salvation, Spirit of Faith, Come down reveal the things of God. The hymn attributed each stage in grace, the entire order of salvation by faith, to the Holy Spirit. In the last stanza, it pictured one who had earlier declared,

I know my Saviour lives,

He lives, who died for me,

My inmost soul His voice receives,

praying that the same Holy Spirit would breathe in (as Wesley often explained the word "inspire" to mean), or

Inspire the living faith, . . .

The faith that conquers all,

And doth the mountain move,

And saves whoe'er on Jesus call,

And perfects them in love.12

But the drama of salvation in this volume for the season of Pentecost is played out on a grander stage that binds eternities together, as does the biblical doctrine of the Holy Spirit. An untitled hymn toward the end declared the ancient Hebrew doctrine of the creating Spirit, in words that should move the heart of any Christian theologian. And it united that teaching, as Christians from the beginning have, with that of the sanctifying Spirit who recreates a ruined race in all the image of God's love. The hymn's words make more of mine superfluous:

Author of every work Divine,

Who dost through both creations shine,

The God of Nature and of grace,

Thy glorious steps in all we see,

And wisdom attribute to Thee,

And power, and majesty, and praise.

Thou didst Thy mighty wings outspread,

And brooding o'er the chaos, shed

Thy life into the impregn'd abyss,

The vital principle infuse,

And out of nothing's womb produce

The earth and heaven, and all that is.

That all-informing breath Thou art

Who dost continued life impart,

And bidd'st the world persist to be.

Garnish'd by Thee yon azure sky,

And all those beauteous orbs on high

Depend in golden chains from Thee.

Thou dost create the earth anew,

(Its Maker and Preserver too,)

By Thine almighty arm sustain.

Nature perceives Thy secret force,

And still holds on her even course,

And owns Thy providential reign.

Thou art the Universal Soul,

The plastic power that fills the whole,

And governs earth, air, sea, and sky.

The creatures all Thy breath receive,

And who by Thy inspiring live,

Without Thy inspiration die.

Spirit immense, eternal Mind,

Thou on the souls of lost mankind

Dost with benignest influence move

Pleased to restore the ruin'd race,

And new-create a world of grace

In all the image of Thy love.13

In the religion of the Wesleys, creation theology and salvation theology had become one, in grace. And grace, for them, had become a synonym for the presence and action of the hallowing Spirit-in the universe, and in the lives of God's children.

The summation of salvation theology found in this volume of Pentecost hymns was crucial in the development after 1772 of John Fletcher's understanding of Christian perfection.14 I wish in the light of it to review the teachings about the Holy Spirit in the several volumes the Wesley brothers wrote and published in the preceding years under the title Hymns and Sacred Poems. And I will compare them briefly with the volumes of hymns which they wrote and published separately during the same decade.

But first I must deal with the question whether these hymns are indeed an index to the thought of John Wesley, or simply a demonstration of the poetic skill of Charles. A long rhetorical tradition has it that John was the preacher and Charles the poet of early Methodism. And an equally long tradition sustains the notion that the slight difference of sensibility between them-what John called his brother's tendency to flights of imagination in which he used mystic language imprecisely-eventually opened up a small but growing separation in their understanding of the doctrine of Christian perfection.

These long-established traditions are without foundation in anything the brothers either wrote or were reported to have said in the years before 1760.15 Moreover, we have no firm ground upon which to attribute to one brother more than the other any of the poems that appeared between 1738 and 1747 in the jointly-authored volumes. To their dying day, the two Wesleys kept their agreement never to indicate which one had been responsible for the original text of the poems that had first appeared under their joint authorship. No manuscript has survived to show that they kept a private record or even shared a remembrance of which one wrote the first draft of any one.16

And textual analyses aimed at determining authorship have not dealt at all adequately with the close kinship of scriptural exegesis and metaphor in the hymns to that appearing in John Wesley's first three volumes of sermons, all preached and published during the decade.17

But even if the question of literary authorship could be resolved largely in favor of Charles, John Wesley in his prefaces to the several jointly authored volumes specifically

commended as his own their biblical and doctrinal content. His selection and further editing in 1780 and 1782 of what he thought were the best of them for his Collection of Hymns for the People Called Methodists, the permanent treasury of Wesleyan song, further assures us that their theology as well as their poetic power had in his view stood the test of time.

In the first of the volumes titled Hymns and Sacred Poems, published in 1739, the "Hymn to the Holy Ghost" began with the stanza

Come Holy Ghost, all-quickening fire,

Come, and in me delight to rest!

Drawn by the lure of strong desire,

O, come and consecrate my breast;

The temple of my soul prepare,

And fix Thy sacred presence there!

In a medley of scriptural references which interlaced pentecostal and Pauline metaphors, the hymn celebrated first the work and witness of the Holy Spirit in regeneration-

My peace, my life, my comfort now,

My treasure, and my all Thou art!

True witness of my sonship Thou,

Engraving pardon on my heart:

Seal of my sins in Christ forgiven,

Earnest of love and pledge of heaven.

-then cried out for His sanctifying fullness:

Come then, My God, mark out Thy heir,

Of heaven a larger earnest give,

With clearer light Thy witness bear,

More sensibly within me live.

Let all my powers Thy entrance feel

And deeper stamp Thyself the seal.18

The next hymn in the volume, "On the Descent of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost," altered from a poem originally written by Dr. H. Moore, began with the story of Acts 1 and 2. "His faithful flock," languishing for "their absent Lord," wait humbly until

The promised Grace and rushing wind

Descends, and cloven tongues of fire.

The hymn then became a prayer of present-day believers for purity of heart, as the following stanzas show:

Father! If justly still we claim

To us and ours the promise made,

To us be graciously the same,

And crown with living fire our head. . .

The Spirit of refining fire,

Searching the inmost of the mind,

To purge all fierce and foul desire,

And kindle life more pure and kind....

The Spirit breathe of inward life,

Which in our hearts Thy laws may write.

Then grief expires, and pain and strife;

'Tis nature all, and all delight.

Grant this, 0 Holy God, and true!

The ancient seers Thou didst inspire;

To us perform the promise due,

Descend and crown us now with fire.

These lines affirmed what Wesleyans have ever since thought Jesus reiteration of the "promise of the Father" and Peter's sermon on the Day of Pentecost declared: that being filled with the sanctifying Spirit was the central promise of both the Old and New Testaments, and the privilege of all believers striving against inward sin. The little-noticed preface to the volume made the same point, though less explicitly, in the context of Wesley's rejection of the "solitary religion" of the mystics in favor of "social holiness."19

The lines also harmonized with the hymn that appeared earlier in the volume, titled "Acts I, 4, 'Wait for the promise of the Father, which ye have heard of me.' " Stanzas one and four distinguished clearly being "washed in the fountain" of Christ's blood from the inward renewal in the "light and liberty of love" that the "promised Comforter" irnparted. The first and sixth stanzas paralleled John Wesley's three discourses on the opening section of the Sermon on the Mount, preached repeatedly the summer and fall of the great revival year, 1739. The seventh anticipated his exposition of John 8:37-38 in his sermon on"Christian Perfection," published early in 1741:

1. Saviour of men, how long shall I

Forgotten at Thy footstool lie!

Wash'd in the fountain of Thy blood

Yet groaning still to be renew'd;

2. A miracle of grace and sin,

Pardon'd, yet still, alas, unclean!

Thy righteousness is counted mine;

When will it in my nature shine?

4. Why didst Thou the first gift impart,

And sprinkle with Thy blood my heart,

But that my sprinkled heart might prove

The light and liberty of love?

6. See then Thy ransom'd servant, see;

I hunger, Lord, I thirst for Thee!

Feed me with love, Thy Spirit give;

I gasp, in Him, in Thee to live.

7. The promised Comforter impart,

Open the Fountain in my heart;

There let Him flow with springing joys,

And into life eternal rise.

8. There let Him ever, ever dwell

The Pledge, the Witness, and the Seal.

I'll glory then in sin forgiven,

In Christ my life, my love, my heaven!20

Another hymn entitled simply "Acts II, 41," echoed the Wesleyan teaching that the multitude who became believers at Pentecost did not at that time receive the full renewal in love the company in the upper room did, but its foretaste: the assurance of pardon and the witness of the Holy Spirit to their adoption and incorporation into the body of Christ.

In many a soul the Saviour stirred,

Three thousand yielded and believed.

Likewise, the "Hymn for Whitsunday," the old English word for Pentecost, expressed gratitude that the Saviour's prayer for the coming of the Comforter is partially answered whenever repentant sinners receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. That gift brings them the beginnings of inward holiness, which John Wesley always declared was the mark of the new birth, of new life in Christ.

Never will He then depart,

Inmate of a humble heart

Carrying on His work within

Striving 'til He cast out sin.21

The closing hymn of the volume, on Jesus' words of promise the night of His betrayal, is titled "John XVI:24. Ask and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full." John Wesley had declared this unqualified promise, reiterating the one in chapter 14, "Ye shall ask what ye will," to refer only to perfect love. The poem expressed clearly the believer's hope for "liberty," for "perfect love" and, putting it in the first person, for

All the joy, and peace and power,

All my Saviour asks above.

The sixth stanza prayed:

Since the Son hath made me free

Let me taste my liberty,

Thee behold with open face,

Triumph in Thy saving grace,

Thy great will delight to prove

Glory in Thy perfect love.

The closing stanzas rested this hope for inward holiness upon the joyous experience of what Jesus in the text had encouraged His dismayed apostles to expect "in that day" when "He, the Spirit of truth" should come:

Heavenly Adam, Life Divine

Change my nature into Thine;

Move and spread throughout my soul,

Actuate and fill the whole.

Be it I no longer now

Living in the flesh, but Thou.

Holy Ghost, no more delay;

Come, and in Thy Temple stay;

Now Thy inward witness bear,

Strong, and permanent, and clear.

Spring of Life, Thyself impart,

Rise eternal in my heart!22

The preface to the second volume of Hymns and Sacred Poems, published late in the year 1740, contained John Wesley's first comprehensive description of the place of a second moment of sanctifying grace in the experience of heart purity. That description, and the scriptural foundation upon which the poems which followed declared it to rest, was the keynote of the Methodist doctrine of salvation from that year until the founder's death a half-century later. He made it the centerpiece of his statement of the doctrine in his Plain Account of Christian Perfection, reprinting it there with only minor editorial clarifications.

The salvation wrought by the Holy Spirit, the preface of 1740 declared, "is no other than the image of God fresh stamped on our heart," and "a renewal of believers in the spirit of their minds, after the likeness of Him that created them [Col. 3:10]." God has "now laud the axe unto the root of the tree, purifying their hearts by faith [Luke 2:9 and Acts 15:9]," and "cleansing all the thoughts of their hearts by the inspiration of His Holy Spirit." Only after believers have the continual witness of the Holy Spirit that they are heirs of God [Rom. 8:17] and "joint heirs with Christ," Wesley wrote, are they able to bear the Spirit's disclosure of "all the hidden abominations" of their inward sin, "the depths of pride, self-will, and hell." They cry, then, for a "full renewal" in God's image, in "righteousness and all true holiness" [Eph. 4:24]. Then God remembers His holy covenant and He giveth them a single eye and a pure heart; He stamps upon them His own image and superscription; He createth them anew in Christ Jesus; He cometh unto them with His Son and blessed Spirit, and, fixing His abode in their souls, bringeth them into the "rest which remaineth for the people of God."23

The hymns in this second volume expounded carefully the entire range of scriptural events and metaphors to which the Wesleys thereafter appealed to sustain the promise of entire sanctification by faith. In simple numbers and extent, the expositions which grounded that promise in the atonement, in full inward cleansing by the blood of Jesus, were more numerous.

But they scarcely overshadowed the strong ones which declared that believers are perfected in love by being filled with the Holy Spirit, as the apostles were at Pentecost. Here appeared for the first time the well known poem that Wesleyans have for a century or more sung beginning with the fourth stanza:

Jesus, Thy all-victorious love

Shed in my heart abroad;

Then shall my feet no longer rove

Rooted and fixed in God.

Stanzas seven through nine pointed to John the Baptist's prophecy that Jesus, the Christ, would baptize with "the Holy Spirit, and fire."

O that in me the sacred fire

Might now begin to glow,

Burn up the dross of base desire,

And make the mountains flow!

O that it now from heaven might fall,

And all my sins consume!

Come, Holy Ghost, for Thee I call,

Spirit of burning, come!

Refining fire, go through my heart,

Illuminate my soul,

Scatter Thy life through every part,

And sanctify the whole.24

The ideas, the language, and the imagery of the preface to the 1740 volume, however, were most clearly reflected in the great "Hymn to God the Sanctifier." Its first and last stanzas began with the words borrowed from the opening line of "Come, Holy Ghost, all-quickening fire." These stanzas stressed in turn, as the body of the hymn did, the two dimensions of grace dispensed at Pentecost: the gift and witness of the Spirit in the regeneration of those who repent and believe the Gospel Now to my soul Thyself reveal;

Thy mighty working let me feel,

And know that I am born of God;

and the experience of His sanctifying fullness that empties believers of "pride, self-will, and hell," of "hate, envy, jealousy," and of all evil desires.25

Precisely parallel was the hymn "Groaning for the Spirit of Adoption." Its title referred only to what the first three of the six stanzas contained-a plea for the witness of the Spirit to the new birth. That witness brought "the Spirit of power within, of love, and of a healthful mind," of "power to conquer inbred sin." (Wesley always taught, as in his sermon on "The Spirit of Bondage and Adoption," that regeneration brought victory over, but not the destruction of, the "inbred enemy.") The last two lines of stanza three celebrated the answer to this petition:

He comes! And righteousness Divine

And Christ, and all with Christ is mine!

The poem then became a further prayer for heart purity, in which St. Paul's phrases reinforce pentecostal promises from the writings of St. John and St. Luke:

O that the Comforter would come,

Nor visit as a transient guest,

But fix in me His constant home,

And take possession of my breast,

And make my soul His loved abode,

The temple of indwelling God!

Come, Holy Ghost, my heart inspire,

Attest that I am born again!

Come, and baptize me now with fire

Or all Thy former gifts are vain.

I cannot rest in sins forgiven;

Where is the earnest of my heaven?

Where the Indubitable Seal

That ascertains the kingdom mine?

The powerful stamp I long to feel,

The signature of love Divine:

O, shed it in my heart abroad,

Fulness of love, of heaven, of God!26

Numerous hymns thus described or celebrated both works of the Spirit's sanctifying grace. The one entitled simply "Matthew v,3, 4, 6" summarized, stanza by stanza, the meanings John Wesley attached to those three verses of Scripture in his discourses on the Sermon on the mount, preached repeatedly in 1739 and 1740: pardon and the experience of "the kingdom of an inward heaven"; the assurance or witness of the Spirit to regeneration ("And I receive the Comforter"); and perfect love:

Where is the blessedness bestow'd

On all that hunger after Thee?

I hunger now, I thirst for God! . . .

Fill me with Thy righteousness.27

Other hymns dealt with only one or the other of these two moments in grace. The poem whose seventh stanza became the first one of the ever popular "O for a thousand tongues to sing My great Redeemer's praise" is entirely about the new birth. Although its imagery is largely of Christ and His atoning sacrifice, in stanza four the author testified,

Then with my heart I first believed

Believed with faith Divine;

Power with the Holy Ghost received

To call the Saviour mine.28

By contrast, the great third hymn of the series of four on one of John Wesley's favorite texts, "Christ is made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption," expounded the experience of heart purity in thoroughly pentecostal terms. Stanzas one, five, and six read:

Jesu! my Life, Thyself apply,

Thy Holy Spirit breathe,

My vile affections crucify,

Conform me to Thy death.

Scatter the last remains of sin,

And seal me Thine abode;

O, make me glorious all within,

A temple built by God.

My inward holiness Thou art,

For faith hath made Thee mine;

With all Thy fulness fill my heart,

'Til all I am is Thine!29

The longest poem, titled "The Life of Faith, Exemplified in the Eleventh Chapter of St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews," began with reference to the twelfth chapter's opening lines: Author of Faith, Eternal Word Whose Spirit breathes the active flame

Faith, like its Finisher and Lord, Today as Yesterday the same. Succeeding sections affirmed in unequivocal language that the Old Testament saints described in chapter 11 experienced justification by faith precisely as New Testament Christians did. And the final stanzas declared that the fulfillment of the promise the patriarchs did not completely realize occurs in Christians who experience "The Christ, the Fullness in the Soul," and in whom "the Holy Ghost abides."30

The last hymn in the volume for 1740 was entitled "Hebrews iv. 9. There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God." It is the best index we have to the content of John Wesley's sermon on "The Rest of Faith." He preached that sermon the first time to the Kingswood miners on June 1, 1740, again two months later at the first service held in the new meetinghouse in London, "the Foundery," and thereafter in many places. In the hymn, the imagery of pilgrimage and promised land predominates, as the text would dictate. The climactic stanzas, however, do not point, as the Epistle to the Hebrews does, to the blood of the "new covenant" by which believers may "enter into the holiest." They appeal, rather, to the promise of Pentecost in John 14:15-23 and to St. Paul's words in Ephesians 1:13 declaring that believers are to be "sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise":

Come, O my Saviour, come away,

Into my soul descend;

No longer from Thy creature stay,

My Author and my End....

Come, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,

And seal me Thine abode;

Let all I am in Thee be lost,

Let all I am be God!31

In the two years before the appearance in 1742 of the third volume of Hymns and Sacred Poems, John Wesley's preaching and published writings made all the world aware that he believed a "second moment" of inwardly sanctifying grace was an integral part of the process by which the Holy Spirit perfected God's children in love.32 In April 1742, his brother Charles scandalized Oxford with a sermon before the university published at once, inquiring insistently of faculty and students, Hast thou "received the Holy Ghost?" If thou hast not, thou art not yet a Christian.... Dost thou know what religion is? That it is a participation of the divine nature; the life of God in the soul of man; Christ formed in the heart; "Christ in thee, the hope of glory? . . .righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost."33

This point made, from the text of Ephesians 4:14, "Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead," the preacher-poet explained that the succeeding words, "and Christ shall give thee light," referred to the further experience of the same Holy Spirit's sanctifying fullness. The "Promise of the Father," given through Isaiah and Ezekiel and reiterated by Jesus after His resurrection, was fulfilled at Pentecost. In a paragraph on Peter's response to the three thousand who asked what they should do to be saved (Acts 2:38), Charles urged his audience, "Receive this [the remission of sins] . . . and thou art justified freely through faith. Thou shalt be sanctified also through faith that is in Jesus." The world cannot receive either the witness or the fullness of the Spirit because, as Jesus said before the crucifixion, it neither sees nor knows Him. "The indwelling Spirit of God," the preacher continued, "is the common privilege of all believers, the blessing of the gospel, the unspeakable gift, the universal promise, the criterion of a real Christian." To deny "this inspiration, this receiving of the Holy Ghost, and being sensible of it" and to deny "the being moved by the Spirit or filled " with Him, he cried, is to "deny the whole Scriptures; the whole truth, and promise, and testimony of God."34 Modern Wesleyans, not being acquainted with this sermon as Charles's contemporaries were, have not suspected that the last two stanzas of "Come, Holy Ghost, Our Hearts Inspire," are cryptic prayers for the second work of grace.

None should have been surprised, therefore, to find the preface of the third hymnbook, published in 1742, declaring that entire sanctification was the theme of many of the poems in the volume. Here appeared the one entitled "The Promise of Sanctification" that Charles had written late in 1740 on Ezekiel 36 to accompany the published version of his brother's famous sermon, "Christian Perfection." Twenty-four years later John reprinted in A Plain Account the two following stanzas of it, to remind critics of what had been the hymnbook's central theme:

Chose from the world, if now I stand,

Adorn'd with righteousness divine;

If, brought into the promised land,

I justly call the Saviour mine;

The sanctifying Spirit pour,

To quench my thirst and wash me clean,

Now Saviour, let the gracious shower

Descend, and make me pure from sin.35

Another poem, attributed long afterwards to John, interpreted the Lord's Prayer as a plea for holiness. It reappeared four years later attached to his sixth discourse on the Sermon on the Mount. "Spirit of grace, and health, and power," the stanza addressed to the Holy Spirit ran, "Inflame our hearts with perfect love."36

The long section in the 1742 volume headed "seeking entire sanctification" began with a "Hymn for the Day of Pentecost." It affirmed that the promise of being filled with the Spirit belongs to all who have received Him, as did the three thousand who were converted on that day. "The Spirit comes, and sinners live," an early line put it; and from that moment they wait in hope that He will make their hearts "His loved, His everlasting home." In this hope, they pray

Lord, we believe to us and ours

The apostolic promise given....

Now, Lord, the Comforter bestow,

And fix in us the Guest Divine.

Assembled here with one accord

Calmly we wait the promised grace,

The purchase of our dying Lord,

Come, Holy Ghost, and fill the place.37

The succeeding hymn, also for Pentecost Sunday, carried precisely the same message, though its use of the term "sinners" to refer to all who did not yet enjoy "settled comfort, perfect love, everlasting righteousness," and of the words "saved from sin," as John Wesley's habit had recently become, to mean being delivered from inbred sin, might confuse readers steeped in twentieth-century Wesleyan language. The keys to interpreting these phrases, and so the poem, are the words referring to perfect love and to the Spirit's permanent indwelling. For during these years both John and Charles Wesley inclined, as

John recalled later, toward the idea that the sealing of the Holy Spirit in entire sanctification constituted an assurance of final Derseverance. Hence the hymn's closing lines:

Father, behold we claim

The gift in Jesus' name.

Him, the promised Comforter,

Into all our spirits pour,

Let Him fix His mansion here,

Come, and never leave us more.38

The Pentecostal theme appeared several times in this variation, as in the polemic hymn entitled "Let God be true, and every man a liar," aimed at all who believed "no perfection is below, no love that casts out fear." Two early stanzas read Thou shalt on me Thy Spirit pour,

And make the sinner clean;

In confidence I wait the hour

When I shall cease from sin.

I trust that to the life Divine

Thou wilt my soul restore,

And I shall in Thine image shine,

And I shall sin no more.

The ninth stanza showed this hope becoming faith:

I shall be perfected in love

For Thou hast spoke the word,

The servant cannot be above,

But shall be as, his Lord.39

The rich variety of biblical texts and allusions in this volume might seem to the uninitiated proof only of active poetic imaginations. They reflected in fact the close study of Scripture that long had bound the two Wesleys to each other and to their Lord, and the careful expositions of passages that were central to their sermons and tracts on Christian perfection.40 Many of the hymns referred to being filled and several to being baptized with the Spirit. Scores of them referred unambiguously to a second moment, a second blessing, of sanctifying grace, using such terms or metaphors as the indwelling Spirit, Christ enthroned within, refining fire, Christian liberty, full redemption, salvation from sin, heart purity, cleansing by the blood of Christ, renewal in the image of the Creator, perfect love, and "all the mind that was in" Christ Jesus.41 The beautiful "Prayer for Holiness," whose refrain at the end of each stanza read "Help me Saviour, speak the word, and perfect me in love," asked in the seventh,

Lord, if I on Thee believe

The second gift impart;

With the indwelling Spirit give

A new, a loving heart.42

Notable for the richness of these biblical allusions is the widely loved hymn,

O for a heart to praise my God,

An heart from sin set free!

An heart that always feels

Thy blood So freely spilt for me!

An heart resign'd, submissive, meek,

My dear Redeemer's throne,

Where only Christ is heard to speak

Where Jesus reigns alone....

My heart, thou know'st, can never rest,

Till Thou create my peace,

Till of my Eden repossest,

From self and sin I cease.

Titled simply "Psalm li. 10: 'Make me a Clean Heart, O God,' " this hymn draws far more from the apostle Peter's sermon at Pentecost that declared God's covenant with David fulfilled in Christ's enthronement, I think, than from the picture of a morally fallen king that the psalm conjures up.43

The hymnbook for 1742 also displayed the roots of the doctrine of Christian perfection that the two brothers had long since come to believe were found in the Old Testament. The volume opened with a long poem on the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, which

the New Testament makes the source of John the Baptist's preaching. A dozen or more on other Old Testament texts followed it. They demonstrate how wrong were those of us who have until recently supposed the Wesleys did not ground their doctrine of Christian perfection in the teachings of Moses and the prophets. One on Genesis 3:15 expounded the curse upon Satan at the Fall as in fact a promise to Eve of a recovery of Eden through her seed, the Son. The writer prayed:

O, reveal Thy Son in me,

Bring the perfect nature in,

Now destroy the enmity,

Now consume the Man of Sin.

. . . Make my soul Thy pure abode,

Fill'd with all the Deity,

Swallow'd up and lost in God.

Two poems from texts in the prophecy of Isaiah united the rhetoric of atoning blood and sanctifying Spirit. The one entitled "The Fourth Chapter of Isaiah" prayed

O that the grace were now applied!

Bring in, dear Lord, a purer flood;

Open the fountain of thy side,

And purge out all our tainted blood....

The judging, burning Spirit inspire,

O let Him to His temple come

And sit as a refiner's fire,

And all our sin condemn, consume.45

The other, inspired by Isaiah 32:2, "And a man [Jesus Christ, the Wesleys believed] shall be as an hiding place," implored

Let Thy merit as a cloud

Still interpose between;

Plead the atonement of Thy blood

Till I am cleansed from sin.

Weary, parch'd with Thirst, and faint

Till Thou abiding Spirit breathe

Every moment, Lord, I wait

The merit of Thy death.46

And little wonder; for the Wesleys saw clearly, as Christians in all ages have, the connection between Jesus' promise of the Comforter and His prayer for the sanctification of His disciples (recorded in John 14-17) and the events of Pentecost. Especially pervasive were the changes on the theme of Jesus' words at the beginning of that promise, "He is with you and shall be in you." Consider such verses as the following:

For with me art Thou, and shalt be within.47

With me He dwells, and bids Thee come;

Answer Thine own effectual prayer.48

With me, I know, Thy Spirit dwells,

Nor ever shall depart

Till in me He Himself reveals

And purifies my heart.49

With us, in us, here below;

Enter and make us free indeed.

. . . with me now Thy Spirit stays,

And, hovering, hides me in His wings. . . .

Till all the stony He remove,

And in my loving heart resides.50

Holy Ghost, the Comforter

The gift of Jesus, come. . . .

Present with us Thee we feel,

Come, O come, and in us be

With us, in us live and dwell To all eternity.51

This theme from the Gospel of John is central also to the poem expounding St. Paul's word to Titus concerning "the grace of God that bringeth salvation" (Titus 2:11-14), the text of which was printed on the title-page of the 1742 volume. Scorning the notion that God would "bid the guilt depart, and leave the power behind," the writers affirmed that

Faith, when it comes, breaks every chain,

And makes us truly free;

But Christ hath died for thee in vain,

Unless He lives in thee.

Then, grandly, they asked, in words memorable to those reared amidst Wesleyan hymnody, "What is our calling's glorious hope, But inward holiness?" Give me, the singers prayed, "a faith that roots out sin, and purifies my heart." The closing stanzas linked all this to the promise of the indwelling Spirit:

When Jesus makes my soul His home,

My sin shall all depart;

And lo! He saith, "I quickly come,

To cleanse and fill thy heart!"

Be it according to Thy word!

Redeem me from all sin;

My heart would now receive Thee, Lord;

Come in, my Lord, come in!52

Similar Pentecostal imagery dominated the poem based on Jesus'word in Mark 11:22-24, promising a faith so great as to enable a believer to "say unto this mountain, Be thou removed." John Wesley thought this passage referred to the prayer of faith for sanctification and linked it to Jesus' word on the Comforter in John 16:24, "Ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full." The metaphor appeared earlier in the line "make the mountains flow" in the well-known "Jesus, Thy all-victorious Love," quoted above.53 Here it reads:

It shall be so; I do not doubt,

The mountain shall depart;

Sin shall be shortly all cast out

Of my believing heart. . . .

I have the things for which I pray

And fervently desire,

Jesus, take all my sins away,

Baptize me with Thy fire.54

The hymn in the 1742 volume that seems most fully to incorporate all the scriptural themes the Wesleys used in preaching heart purity, however, expounds Jesus' words as recorded in Luke 12:50, "I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished." In its stanzas, the proper baptism of Jesus, which all His followers require, consists in being baptized "with the Holy Spirit, and fire," with "love, mighty love," which is the "Spirit's seal":

An inward baptism, Lord, of fire

Wherewith to be baptized, I have,

'Tis all my longing soul's desire;

This, only this, my soul can save.

Straiten'd I am till this be done:

Kindle in me the living flame,

Father, in me reveal Thy Son,

Baptize me into Jesus name.

Transform my nature into Thine

Let all my powers Thine impress feel,

Let all my soul become Divine,

And stamp me with Thy Spirit's seal. . . .

Love, mighty Love, my heart o'erpower;

Ah! Why dost Thou so long delay?

Cut short the work, bring near the hour,

And let me see Thy perfect day.55

I think the care with words that we see in these hymns not only made the two brothers fine poets but made them admirable biblical theologians as well.56 The precision of their poetic expression of scriptural ideas grew out of their respect for both clear thinking and honest exegesis. It reflected also their life-long relish of openness, of close mutual criticism, nurtured since their Oxford days in an atmosphere of Christian as well as fraternal love. They wrote poems for joy, but not merely for fun; they intended by them to teach divinity, and so to enrich the vision of truth in which their people worshiped God.57

This intention prompted John to prepare on his own a volume of Hymns on the Lord 's Supper, published in 1745, the same year he issued in three parts his Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion. Each hymn in the volume, like the climactic section of each argument in the Appeal, aimed both to deepen wonder at the sacrifice of Christ and to strengthen faith in the sanctifying power that flowed from it through the Holy Spirit. One selection must stand here for all-number 31,

O Rock of our salvation, see

The souls that seek their rest in Thee.

Its governing image-the wounded side of the dying Christ, flowing water and blood-unfolded in lines that anticipated in close detail those of August Toplady's sublime "Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me," published thirty-one years later. Only with Wesley, the message was imparted holiness, purity of heart, and perfect love:

. . . Beneath Thy cooling shadow hide,

And keep us, Saviour, in Thy side;

By water and by blood redeem,

And wash us in the mingled stream.

The sin-atoning blood apply,

And let the water sanctify,

Pardon and holiness impart,

Sprinkle and purify our heart,

Wash out the last remains of sin,

And make our inmost nature clean.

The double stream in pardon rolls

And brings Thy love into our souls;. . .

We here Thy utmost power shall prove

Thy utmost power of perfect love.58

By some special kind of poetic irony, six generations of American Wesleyans have sung Toplady's hymn, long the nation's favorite, in blissful disregard of its author's staunch Calvinism and of his possible debt to their founder's forgotten words. They read Methodist meanings into Toplady's grander lines, remembering John Wesley's teaching that water in biblical symbol nearly always stands for the sanctifying Spirit. Nineteenth-century holiness teachers were never any more able than Wesley or St. Paul had been to think of the Holy Spirit apart from Jesus, whose name was "Emmanuel"-God with us. They cried,

Let the water and the blood,

From Thy wounded side which flowed,

Be of sin the double cure,

Save from wrath, and make me pure.59

Two years later Charles also published a volume of his own, called Hymns for Those That Seek and Those That Have Redemption in the Blood of Jesus Christ. John liked them so well that by 1782 he had placed twenty-four of the total of fifty-two in his long-standard Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists. Among them was the perennial favorite of Wesleyans from that day to this,

Love Divine, all loves excelling,

Joy of heaven to earth come down.

The sharpest analytical scalpel cannot divide its doctrine of the Son from its prayer to the Spirit:

. . . Fix in us Thy humble dwelling,

All Thy faithful mercies crown.

Jesus, Thou art all compassion,

Pure, unbounded love Thou art,

Visit us with Thy salvation

Enter every trembling heart.

Breathe, O breathe Thy loving Spirit,

Into every troubled breast,

Let us all in Thee inherit,

Let us find that second rest.

Take away our power of sinning,*

Alpha and Omega be,

End of faith as its Beginning,

Set our hearts at liberty.

*The words "power of sinning" were changed to "bent to sinning" after the Wesleys had decided, in the late 1750's, that the experience of perfect love did not guarantee final perseverance.

Come, Almighty to deliver,

Let us all Thy life receive;

Suddenly return, and never,

Never more Thy temples leave.

Thee we would be always blessing,

Serve Thee as Thy hosts above,

Pray and praise Thee without ceasing,

Glory in Thy perfect love.

Allusions to what all Methodists by then recognized as key texts from which the Wesleys proclaimed the second work of sanctifying grace appear on every line of this great poem.60

What remains are two footnotes, elevated here into the text so readers won't have to turn to the fine print below. A close search of the two volumes of Hymns and Sacred Poems that Charles Wesley wrote alone and published at Bristol in 1749 shows no departure at all from the meanings and the metaphors of the poetic language the two brothers used when writing together about the Hallowing Spirit-and no innovations in the use of scriptural texts. A prime example appears in the first volume in part three of the long poem on Isaiah 26. It recounts, in the form of a testimony, the experience of one who in "anguish, agony, and grief" labored to be truly "born again," as were those saints of old in whom God was glorified:

Shepherdless souls they wander'd wide,

'Til call'd and perfected in One.

The testimony ends with a declaration of faith that

The Spirit that raised Him from the dead

Shall raise us all with Christ our Head,

And hallow and baptize with fire.61

John Wesley declared in his Plain Account of Christian Perfection that he "quite approved" the principal hymns in the section of Charles's second volume dedicated to "those that wait for full salvation"; and he quoted, as an example, the lines Jesus, our life, in us appear,

Who daily die Thy death;

Reveal Thyself the finisher;

Thy quick'ning Spirit breathe.62

In 1755, John Wesley published the first part of his common-sense commentary on the Scriptures titled Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament, weaving it on the frame of Pietist John A. Bengel's commentary, published in Germany thirteen years earlier. Wesley brought to that task all his immense skill in Hebrew and Greek, all his knowledge of texts hammered out in three decades of shared study, and all his desire to teach plain people the way to righteousness. Seven or eight years later Charles Wesley published his explanatory notes on the Scriptures, drawing upon both his own and his brother's learning and experience. But Charles expressed their theology of salvation in poetry, in two volumes of Short Hymns on Select Passages of the Holy Scriptures, containing 2030 poems.63 The younger Wesley's power with words was never more firmly bent to his purpose to teach divinity.

By April, 1765 Charles had composed five additional manuscript volumes, chiefly on texts from the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. He revised them lovingly no less than eight times before his death in 1788. These manuscripts his brother revised again and authorized Walter Churchey to publish. "Many," John Wesley wrote Churchey, "are little or nothing inferior to the best of them that have been printed," though he had "corrected or expunged" those "that savor a little of mysticism," as had been his life-long practice.64 The additional poems raised the total of Short Hymns, as they appear in Osborn's edition, to 1609 on Old and 3491 on New Testament texts. To read the fine hymns on Jeremiah 31, Ezekiel 36, John 14 (thirty-one on this chapter alone!) and Acts 1-2, or on the occasions when each of the four Gospels quotes John the Baptist's declaration, "He shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit," is to see how persistent was the vision of Pentecost in the Wesleyan proclamation of heart purity.65 That vision clearly lay at the center of the great revival of the years 1759-1762, during which the first edition was prepared. And that revival, as all students of the subject know, set the tone of Wesleyan religious culture in England and America for the next half-century.

One final observation. The relationship of music to religion lies deep in the history of all cultures-Hindu, Chinese, and Greek, as well as Hebrew and Christian. The point of convergence has often been mystic experience. That the Wesleyan proclamation of Christian perfection, cast in the words of Jesus and Paul that declare the new man in Christ is to be "filled with all the fullness of God," fanned mystic sparks into musical flame should not surprise us. We properly marvel, however, that in the hands of these two men, the hymnody of holiness always makes sense-beautiful, biblical sense. Their understanding of the gospel was steeped in Scripture and reason-or, perhaps we should say, in reasoning about scripture. They understood living faith to bring a knowledge of the Lord that was not gnostic at all, but moral, and consistent with the long centuries of the Christian quest for righteousness and perfect love.66

1John and Charles Wesley, Hymns of Petition and Thanksgiving for the Promise of the Father (Bristol: 1746; reprinted in The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley, coll. and arr. G. Osborn; 13 vols.; London: 1869), 4:162-204.

2John and Charles Wesley, Hymns of Petition, 4:199.

John Wesley, sermon, "On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield (1770), in John Wesley, Works, 14 vols. (London: 1872, reprinted, Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 1978), 7: 179 (section III, 4); and John Wesley, Journal, ed. Nehemiah

Curnock, 8 vols. (London: R. Culley, 1909-16), entry for July 6, 1739, and Curnock's accompanying Note, 2:242, concerning Whitefield's preparation, and Wesley's editing, of his sermon "The Indwelling of the Spirit."

4John and Charles Wesley, Hymns . . . for the Promise of the Father (1746), pp. 185, 187, 190.

5John and Charles Wesley, Hymns . . . for the Promise of the Father, pp. 184, 190.

6John and Charles Wesley, Hymns . . . for the Promise of the Father, pp. 172-79, the quotation being from p. 173; cf. 200-01, and the last hymn in the volume, 203-04.

7John and Charles Wesley, Hymns . . . for the Promise of the Father, p. 178.

8John Wesley, sermon, "Scriptural Christianity" (1744), in his Works, 6:48; and Wesley, Journal, August 24, 1744.

9John Wesley, sermon, "The First-Fruits of the Spirit" (1745), Works, 6:88, 91, 96-97.

10John Wesley, A Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion (London: 1744), Works, 8:76-106 (Part I, sections V-1 through V-27), the quotation being from p. 76. The poem, "Primitive Christianity," attached to John Wesley, An Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion (London: 1743), in Works, 8:43-45, shows the ecumenical spirit in which Wesley affirmed all these doctrines of "perfect charity." It is the poetic link between the first and the FartherAppeal (1745), as the last Oxford sermon, published in 1744 is the prose. The poem makes explicit the teaching of a second moment of sanctifying grace that was muted in the Appeals, in the last two stanzas of Part I and the second of Part II. The latter reads:

The few that truly call thee Lord,

And wait thy sanctifying word,

And thee their utmost Saviour own,

Unite, and perfect them in one.

Compare the poem, "An Act of Devotion," published at the end of Part I of A Farther Appeal in Works, 8:155.

11As argued variously in Frederick D. Bruner, A Theology of the Holy Spirit. The Pentecostal Experience and the New Testament Witness (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1971), and James R. Dunn, Baptism in the Holy Spirit. A Reexamination of the New Testament Teaching . . . (Naperville, Ill.: A. R. Allenson, 1970).

12John and Charles Wesley, Hymns . . . for the Promise of the Father (1746) pp. 196-97, reproduced in John Wesley, A Collection of Hymns for the People Called Methodists, 3rd ed. (London: 1782; facsimile reprint, London [1889?]), p. 86.

13John and Charles Wesley, Hymns . . . for the Promise of the Father, p. 199.

14Timothy L. Smith, "How John Fletcher Became the Theologian of Wesleyan Perfectionism, 1770-1776," Wesleyan Theological Journal, 16:1 (Spring 1980), p. 73.

15John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection . . . (London: 1766, reprinted, with a few insigniffcant verbal changes, several times before the author's death in 1791), Works, 11:391-93, is decisive on the point. Cf. John Wesley, Journal, December 16, 1776, December 10, 1788; John Wesley, "Preface" (1779) to Collection of Hymns (1782) in Works 14:340-41; and John Wesley, St. Ives, September 16, 1762, to Miss Furley in Worhs, 12:207.

16See Osborn's note on the question of authorship in John and Charles Wesley, Poetical Works, 7:xv-svi. The Wesleys seem to have ignored John Fletcher's awkward assumption in 1771 that the "Pentecost hymns" displayed Charles's doctrine and not John's; in any case, Fletcher knew differently by 1774, when he published An Essay in Truth, as I think I have shown in "How John Fletcher Became the Theologian of Wesleyan Perfectionism, 1770-1776," WTJ, 16:1, pp. 73-76.

17Henry Bett, The Hymns of Methodism, 3rd edn. (London: Epworth Press, 1946), pp. 21-33; J. Ernest Rattenbury, The Evangelical Doctrines of Charles Wesley's Hymns (London: Epworth Press, 1941), p. 337.

18John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (London: 1739), reprinted in Poetical Works, 1:164-66. This volume reached a 3rd edition by the end of 1739; see Osborn's preface to Poetical Works, l:xvi. The third line of the second stanza

quoted here reads "True witness of my sonship now" in John Wesley, Collection of Hymns (1782), p. 368.

19John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739), pp. 166-66; stanzas 12-14 link Pentecost with the renewal of the whole earth in righteousness and the coming of Christ's kingdom over all. The preface appears in John Wesley, Works, 14:320-21.

20John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739), pp. 96-96. Cf. John Wesley, Journal, entries for July 21, August 26, and October 19, 1739; John Wesley, "The Sermon on the Mount." discourses I. II, III (1739). in Works, 5:247-93; and John Wesley, sermon, "Christian Perfection" (1739), Works, 6:17 (section II, 26).

21John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739), pp. 171-72, 188-89.

22John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739) p. 193. John Wesley, Plain Account (1766), p. 370, quotes the stanza beginning "Heavenly Adam" to illustrate his early belief in entire sanctification. John Wesley, sermon, "Christian Perfection" (1739), Works, 6:17 (secion II, 26) expounds Gal. 2:20, on which the stanza's last two lines are based, asteaching heart purity; and his Plain Account, p. 377, quotes that exposition. On Wesley's exposition of the promise in John 16:24, "that your joy may be full," see John Wesley, The Character of a Methodist (1742) in Works, 8:342, which in turn is quoted and interpreted in his Plain Account (1766), p. 371, as referring to entire sanctification.

23John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (London: 1740), preface, reprinted in Poetical Works, 1:197-204. This volume became parts 3 and 4 of the fourth and fifth editions of the Wesleys' Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739), its preface appearing in the third part of the combined editions, published in 1743 and 1756, according to Osborn, Poetical Works, 1:xvii. Cf. Wesley, Plain Account, pp. 380-81, where the words "He remembers his holy covenant" were omitted. My readings of the scriptural allusions in the four clauses quoted here are Matt. 6:22; "he stamps," etc., either Eph. 1:14 or 2 Cor. 2:22 [see John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament (London: 1755, and many subsequent editions), comments on these two verses]; "he createth," etc., 2 Cor. 5:17; John 14:17, 19, 23; and Hebrews 4:9.

24John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1740), pp. 205-372, passim, and for the quoted hymn, pp. 328-29.

25John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1770), pp. 240-42. The lines quoted here, and those in the preceding paragraph, appear in the versions of the two hymns that John Wesley chose to publish in his Collection of Hymns (1782), pp. 333-34, 346.

26John and Charles Wesley Hymns and Sacred Poems (1740), pp. 307-08. Note that in the second line of the second stanza quoted here the word "attest" is a different and much stronger word than "witness." Its usage here attests that the author is not thinking of the full assurance of regeneration, but of the further demonstration of the authenticity of the seeker's experience of the new birth in his being baptized "with fire."

27John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1740), p. 258. Cf. "Blessed are they that mourn," pp. 330-31, for another hymn on the same passage, with the same message; and above, n. 20.

28John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1740), p. 300.

29John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1740), p. 284. Cf. "A Prayer Against the Power of Sin," page 271, verse 14: Thy powerful Spirit shall subdue unconquerable sin;

Cleanse this foul heart of mine, and make it new

And write Thy law within;

and John Wesley, Collection of Hymns (1782), pp.328-29, containing all but the sixth stanza. The elder Wesley selected each of the hymns quoted in this and the preceding paragraph for the earliest general songbook used widely among Methodists: John Wesley, Hymns and Spiritual Songs Intended for the Use of Real Christians of All Denominations, eighth ed. (London: 1761 [first ed., London: 1753]; see pp. 18 (no. 11), 37 (no. 25),42 (no. 30), and 63 (no. 40).

30John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (London: 1740), in Poetical Works, 1:209, 221, and passim. Cf. The abbreviated version in John Wesley, A Collection of Hymns, p. 95, containing the same first stanza.

31John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1740), pp. 370-72; John Wesley, Journal, June 1 and August 1, 1740. Wesley, Plain Account, p. 382, quoted nine stanzas of this hymn, including the two printed here.

32In addition to the preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems (1740), pp. 197-204, the key documents of these two years are: Wesley's sermon, "Christian Perfection" (1739); and the two tracts, John Wesley, The Character of a Methodist and The Principles of a Methodist (London [1742]), both reprinted in his Works, 8:340-47 and 359-74. In addition, John Wesley's repeated preaching during these years of his first three discourses on the Sermon on the Mount and the sermons entitled "The Law Established by Faith" (1741) and "The Spirit of Bondage and Adoption" (1739), would have instructed Methodists, at least. On the coupling of process with moments of grace in Wesley's doctrine, see Harald Lindstrom Wesley and Sanctification (Stockholm: 1946), pp. 174-78.

33Charles Wesley, sermon, "Awake Thou that Sleepest" ([London: 1742]), in John Wesley, Works, 530.

34Charles Wesley, "Awake Thou," 5:32-34.

35John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (London: 1742), in Poetical Works, 2:preface, 45-48, and, for the hymn, 319-22. Both the preface and the second of the two stanzas quoted here appeared in Wesley, Plain Account, pp. 383-86, and the hymn, of course, in John Wesley, Collection of Hymns (1782), p. 374.

36John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742), pp. 335-36; and, on John's authorship, John Wesley, Standard Sermons, ed. Edward H. Sugden, 2 vols. (London: 1921), 1:445.

37John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742), pp. 227-28. The last line alludes to Matt. 10:24-25, always a key text in John Wesley's exposition of Christian holiness.

38John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742), pp. 229-31; John Wesley, Collection of Hymns (1782), p. 87. Cf. Plain Account, pp. 426, 442, for Wesley's statement that he changed his mind about final perseverance around 1758-59.

39John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742), pp. 285-86; and cf. p. 46, for the comment in the preface on the reference of the Iast line to Matt. 10:24-25; Luke 6:40; and John 13:16. [The preface is reproduced from the 1745 edition in John Wesley, Works, 14:329.] The comment mirrored Wesley's use of Luke 6:40 to teach the experience of heart purity in his sermon, Christian Perfection (1739), Works, 6:16-17 (sections II:21, 22, 24). And it anticipated his use of I John 4:17, "as he is, so are we in this world," as a testimony of "living men who were wholly sanctified," in Minutes of the Conferences . .

., August 2, 1745, in Albert C. Outler, ed., John Wesley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 153.

40A remarkably consistent series of biblical "litanies," as I have called them, stands at the center of John Wesley's presentation of the doctrine of perfect love. The scriptural passages to which these refer provided the great preponderance of material for the hymns on holiness. These litanies appeared in his writings in chronological order, as follows: preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems (1740), pp. 198-202 (reproduced also in Works, 14:323-25); sermon, "Christian Perfection" (1739), Works, 6:16-19- preface to Character of a Methodist (1742), Works, 8:342-46; An Earnest Appeal (1743), 8:21-22, 40-41; John Wesley, Minutes of Some Late Conuersations Between the Rev. Mr. Wesley and Others ([London: 1747]), in Works, 8:294-96; John Wesley, A Letter to the Reverend Doctor Conyers Middleton, Occasioned of His Late "Free Inquiry" ([London: 1747]), in Works, 10:72-73; John Wesley, "Thoughts on Christian Perfection" (1759), in Outler, John Wesley, p. 289; and John Wesley, sermon (see Journal, November 3, 1761), "On Perfection," Works, 6:413-17. All but the last of these were summarized or extensively transcribed in 1766 in his Plain Account.

41For the last of these, see "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, " John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742), pp. 276-77; and cf. the long poem on Isaiah 28:16, Part II, stanzas 1-2, 5, and Part III, stanza 5, in the same, pp. 330-34.

42John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742), p. 275. In John Wesley, Collect on of Hymns (1782), p. 336, the last line quoted reads "A new, a contrite heart."

43John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742), pp. 77-79. The version in John Wesley, Collection of Hymns (1782), p. 324, altered the last line quoted here to read "from every sin I cease."

44John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742), pp. 49-89, and passim, the quoted one appearing on pp. 67-68; cf. pp. 249 (stanzas 8-9), 257, 281. Contrast my own initial misperception of this matter, in Timothy L. Smith, "The Cross Demands, The Spirit Enables," Christianity Today, 23 (February 1978): 26; and John N. Oswalt, "John Wesley and the Old Testament Concept of the Holy Spirit," Reli~ion in Life, 48 (Autumn 1979): 283-291.

45John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742), p. 249. I was also mistaken (in Smith, "The Cross Demands," p. 26) in supposing that the merging of these two ways of speaking came about when American Wesleyans integrated Charles G. Finney's teaching about Pentecost into their traditional rhetoric of cleansing and the cross.

46John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742), p. 207.

47John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742), p. 179, and John Wesley, Collection of Hymns (1782), p. 196. Nehemiah Curnock, the modern editor of John Wesley, Journal, 1:477n., attributed this hymn, "My Father, My God, I Long for Thy Love," to John Wesley and suggested it may date from the months following his experience at Aldersgate. Substantial evidence of the general point here is John Wesley's explication of the text of John 7:38 in his sermon "Christian Perfection" 1739) published the year before (see his Works, 6:10-11); and the comments on John 14:17-23 in John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (London, 1755, and many subsequent editions).

48John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742), p. 197. Only a poet overwhelmingly concerned to guard the doctrine of the Trinity would have composed these tortured lines.

49John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742), p. 243.

50John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742), pp. 256, 272, and John Wesley, Collection of Hymns (1782), pp. 287, 301.

51"Hymn for the Day of Pentecost," John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742), p. 229; John Wesley selected this one for both the Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1753), p. 119, and Collect on of Hymns (1782), p. 471. The first stanza implored Father of our Dying Lord, Give us that for which He prays, Father glorify Thy Son; Show His truth, and power, and grace, And send the promise down.

52John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742), title page, and pp. 304-05. The last stanza begins, "Come, then,Thou heavenly guest, Into Thy temple come." Cf. "The Spirit and the Bride say, Come!" stanza 12, in the same collection, p. 365; "Unto the Angel of the Church of the Laodiceans," Part III, stanzas 1-2, p. 361. The theme persisted in Charles Wesley, Short Hymns on Select Passages of the Holy Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: 1762), reprinted in John and Charles Wesley, Poetical Works, 12:13, and again by John Wesley in The Arminian Magazine (London) 3 (May 1780): 282-83, under the title "He dwelleth with you, and shall be in you."

53John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1740), p. 329, quoted above, p. 12. Cf. also the last stanza of the oft-sung hymn, "Spirit of Faith Come Down," first published in John and Charles Wesley, Hymns for the Promise of the Father (1746), Poetical Works, 4:197.

54John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742), pp. 308-09.

55John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742), pp. 196-97. The word "o'erpower," in the last stanza, is a synonym for, "overwhelm," one of the proper translations of the Greek word for "baptize."

56At least one sister wrote poetry, as did their father. See S[amuel] Wesley, The History of the Holy Bible From the Revolt of Ten Tribes to the End of the Prophets . . ., 2 vols. (London: ["printed for John Hooke"], 1716). A spot-check of the elder Wesley's hymns on Jeremiah 3, Ezekiel 36, Hosea, and Joel shows no kinship at all, however, to the poems of Charles Wesley on these passages, cited below, n. 60.

57Mark A. Noll, "Romanticism and the Hymns of Charles Wesley," The Evangelical Quarterly (Exeter, England), 46(0ct.-Dec., 1974):212-15.

58) John Wesley, Hymns on the Lord 's Supper . . . (Bristol, 1745), in John and Charles Wesley, Poetical Works, 3:238-39. Cf. the closing stanza of hymn no. 33, p. 240. Toplady published the text of the hymn we know as "Rock of Ages" under the title "A Living and Dying Prayer for the Holiest Believer in the World," in the Calvinistic Gospel Magazine for March 1776 attaching it to his article on the moral law of God. In that article, he rejected all compromises with the standard of absolute holiness in this life and therefore proclaimed that the Christian's righteousness must be imputed, not imparted.

59On water as the symbol of the sanctifying Spirit, see Wesley, Plain Accounk p. 435, and the hymn on John 7:37-39, in John and Charles Wesley, Hymns . . . for the Promise of the Father (1746), p. 171. Cf. [National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness], The Double Cure, or Echoes from the Natzonal Camp-Meetings (n. p., n. d.; [Philadelphia? [c.] 18901).

60Charles Wesley, Hymns for Those That Seek, and Those That Have Redemption in the Blood of Jesus Christ (London: 1747), reprinted in John and Charles Wesley, Poetical Works, 4:219; Richard Green, The Works of John and Charles Wesley: A Bibliography, second ed. (London: Methodist Publishing House, 1906), entry no. 105.

61Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems, 2 vols. (Bristol: 1749), I, in John and Charles Wesley, Poetical Works, 4:290-91.

62Wesley, Plain Account, pp. 391-92. His specific exceptions to particular "mystic" phrases in other sections of these two volumes constitute the strongest possible assumption of full responsibility for the ideas and expressions of the hymns they jointly authored. Cf. generally the pentecostal themes in Charles's second volume, in John and Charles Wesley, Poehcal Works, 5:295, 305, 315 (a hymn linking John the Baptist's prophecy to both Pentecost and perfection in love), and 317-18 (on Ephesians 4:8, 11, linking Paul's words to Peter's sermon at Pentecost, and likewise to being "wholly sanctified" and "Derfected in love").

63Charles Wesley, Short Hymns on Select Passages of the Holy Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: 1762), preface, in John Wesley, Works, 14:334; Green, Bibliography, item No. 214.

64John Wesley, Journal, December 10, 1788; John Wesley, n. p., 1789, to Walter Churchey, in Works, 12:438.

65Charles Wesley, Short Hymns on . . . the Holy Scriptures, I . nos. 1336, 1354, 1392, 1456, 1457, in John and Charles Wesley, Poetical Works, 10:34, 41, 58, 82-83; and II nos. 20-22, 782-3, inPoetical Works 10:146-48, 445-46 II, nos. 1200 and i627, in Poetzcal Works 11:127-28, 326; and II, nos. 2092-93, 2096, 2353-54, 2367-69, in Poetical Works, 12:12-15, 135-36, 142-43.

66For his rejection of gnosticism, on the ground of its antinomian tendencies, see John Wesley, "An Answer to the Rev. Mr. Dodd," probably written in the 17609, in Works, 11:453.