Page:The Methodist Hymn-Book Illustrated.djvu/53

 opportunities for song. He wrote about 6,500 hymns, and only death put a period to his music. His most touching and tender note is his swan-song on his death-bed (821).

At Bristol on Saturday, April 25, 1741, Charles Wesley says, ‘Our thanksgiving-notes multiply more and more. One wrote thus: “There was not a word came out of your mouth last night but I could apply it to my own soul, and witness it the doctrine of Christ. I know that Christ is a whole Saviour. I know the blood of Christ has washed away all my sins. I am sure the Lord will make me perfect in love before I go hence, and am no more seen.

Mr. Stead says, ‘The first man whom this hymn helped was Charles Wesley himself. Given the first place in the Methodist hymn-book, it may be said to strike the key-note of the whole of Methodism, that multitudinous chorus, whose voices, like the sound of many waters, encompassed the world.’

Mortimer Collins writes, ‘Wesley’s hymns are as much in earnest as Dibdin’s sea-songs. I suspect Charles Wesley the poet did as much as John Wesley the orator for the permanence of Methodism. The magnetism of personal influence passes away; but the burning life of that wondrous psalmody, sung Sunday after Sunday by congregations full of faith, is imperishable.’

Southey says of the Wesley hymns, ‘Perhaps no poems have ever been so devoutly committed to memory as these, nor quoted so often upon a death-bed. The manner in which they were sung tended to impress them strongly on the mind; the tune was made wholly subservient to the words, not the words to the tune.’

Isaac Taylor wrote, ‘There is no principal element of Christianity, as professed by Protestant churches; there is no moral or ethical sentiment peculiarly characteristic of the gospel; no height or depth of feeling proper to the spiritual life, that does not find itself emphatically and pointedly and clearly conveyed in some stanzas of Charles Wesley’s hymns.’

Earl Selborne regarded Charles Wesley as ‘more subjective and meditative than Watts and his school; there is a didactic turn even in his most objective pieces (as, for example, in his