Charles Wesley
Posts in Comfortable Words credited to ‘Charles Wesley’
A hymn for Christmas, wondering at the mystery of the infinity of God contained within the tiny frame of a new-born child.
In the eighth century, monk John of the Mar Saba monastery near Bethlehem wrote a hymn to Mary, in which he remembered in wonder how the infinite God became a tiny child, making her narrow womb ‘wider than the heavens’. The same paradox struck Charles Wesley, and it prompted him to write a hymn of his own.
The most famous of all Charles Wesley’s Christmas hymns celebrates the birth of Christ, in company with the shepherds of Bethlehem.
‘Hark how all the welkin rings’ was the first line of this famous hymn, when Charles Wesley first composed it in 1739 — welkin being a word of Anglo-Saxon origin meaning the vault of heaven. The subsequent change was Charles’s own; the decision to omit the last two verses from most hymn books was not, and it has sadly diminished the poem as a whole.
A short poem about the transformation of the communion bread and wine by the action of God’s Spirit.
In Charles Wesley’s day, the change effected to the bread and wine in the eucharist was a matter of bitter and often ill-informed dispute. Here, he echoes the wise words of eighth-century monk St John Damascene, and simply asks the Holy Spirit to be present and to do those things which surpass reason and thought.
A meditation on St Paul’s exhortation to put on the whole armour of God.
This is one of Charles Wesley’s best-known hymns, though usually shortened, and in recent times it has been criticised for its supposed ‘militaristic’ tone. The extended military metaphor is, of course, from St Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians; and as Paul himself makes abundantly clear, it is concerned solely with fighting invisible spiritual forces, the dark angels that lord it over men and lands to their own ruin.
Charles Wesley looks forward to the day when Jesus Christ will return to earth.
St Luke tells that when Christ was taken from the Apostles’ sight by a cloud on the Mount of Olives, forty days after his resurrection, he promised he would return in the same fashion. In this famous hymn, Charles Wesley waits in keen anticipation for that day.
A meditation on the birth of Christ, as the light of heaven come down to earth.
There are few Christmas hymns to match this one, by Charles Wesley; yet it is rarely sung today. It deserves better. The central theme is the Sun of Righteousness from the prophecy of Malachi, who would dawn upon the faithful of Israel ‘with healing in his wings’.