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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 Christmas hymn from the seventeenth century, recalling the song the angels sang to the shepherds of Bethlehem.
George Wither was a poet and satirist who fought alongside Charles I against the Scottish Covenanters, and against him in the Civil War. He wrote several hymns, and made a translation of the Psalms into lyric verse. This Christmas hymn was published in Hymns and Songs of the Church (1623).
A hymn looking to the coming of Christ in judgement, sung at the Wesleys’ New Year’s Eve watch-nights.
In his Journal, John Wesley tells us that this was the hymn that he generally chose to conclude his Watch-Night services. John borrowed the idea of these midnight vigils from the Moravians, and they quickly became a popular feature of Wesleyan ministry throughout the year. New Year’s Eve was a favourite for watch-nights, a propitious time for sober reflection and good resolutions.
A short prayer from the Sarum Missal, for the night before Christmas.
This prayer was appointed in the Sarum Missal, the service book of the English Church in the Middle Ages, for Christmas Eve. It is followed here by the Sequence for the day, a poem dating back to the tenth century. This translation into Church English was made by Frederick E. Warren, Canon of Ely, in 1911.
A hymn addressed to the Holy Spirit as God’s royal seal upon the heart.
Hymns and indeed prayers to the Holy Spirit are not particularly common, but Charles Wesley composed several hymns to or about the Spirit. This hymn focuses on the idea (taken from St Paul’s letters) of the Holy Spirit as God’s royal seal on the Christian’s soul, a stamped image marking the believer out as redeemed by and for God.
A Sequence for the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, from the Sarum Use.
A ‘sequence’, in the pre-Reformation liturgy of the English Church, was a hymn sung at the service of holy communion. It was designed to fill the period between the Gradual or Alleluia and the chanting of the Gospel; sadly, both the Reformers and the Popes cut them from the liturgy in the sixteenth century. This particular example, attributed to prolific composer Adam of St Victor (?-1146), of Paris, was sung at the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross on September 14th each year.