Charles Wesley

Life

Charles Wesley was born on December 18, 1707, in Epworth, Lincolnshire, England. His father, Samuel Wesley, was the rector of the local Anglican parish, and his mother was Susanna Wesley. He was the eighteenth of nineteen children and the youngest son, and he was the younger brother of John Wesley, who led the Methodist movement. After attending Westminster School, he entered Christ Church, Oxford, in 1726.

In 1735 he was ordained a priest of the Church of England. That same year he sailed to the colony of Georgia in North America as a missionary, but the mission bore little fruit, and he returned to England in August 1736. On Pentecost Sunday, May 21, 1738, he experienced an evangelical conversion. Three days later his brother John had a similar experience on Aldersgate Street in London (the Aldersgate experience). He married Sarah Gwynne, and they had eight children. He died in London on March 29, 1788.

Ministry and Achievements

The Methodist movement began as a movement of spiritual renewal within the Church of England, and Charles Wesley led it alongside his brother while remaining an Anglican clergyman. He was also active as a preacher, and the New Room in Bristol served as one of his bases of ministry.

His greatest achievement was his hymnody. He wrote his first hymn on the day of his conversion. "And Can It Be," which grew out of his conversion experience, appeared under the title "Free Grace" in the 1739 collection Hymns and Sacred Poems. To mark the first anniversary of his conversion, he wrote an eighteen-stanza poem, from whose seventh stanza came "O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing." The number of hymns he wrote over his lifetime is commonly given as somewhat more than 6,500. The Encyclopædia Britannica states that more than 4,500 of his hymns were published and that some 3,000 more remained in manuscript. Handel set several of his hymns to music. His hymns chiefly celebrate the experience of salvation, personal faith, and the love of God. Some, such as "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling," express the teaching of Wesleyan theology that the believer is brought to perfection through sanctification (the process of being made holy).

Influence on the Korean Church

Thirteen of his hymns are reported to appear in the hymnal currently used by Korean churches. Representative hymns in the New Hymnal include the following:

• No. 15, "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling" (Korean title 「하나님의 크신 사랑」)
• No. 23, "O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing" (「만 입이 내게 있으면」)
• No. 105, "Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus" (「오랫동안 기다리던」)
• No. 280, "Father, I Stretch My Hands to Thee" (「천부여 의지 없어서」)
• No. 388, "Jesus, Lover of My Soul" (「비바람이 칠 때와」)
• No. 522, "Sinners, Turn: Why Will You Die?" (「웬일인가 내 형제여」)
• No. 595, "A Charge to Keep I Have" (「나 맡은 본분은」)

"Jesus, Lover of My Soul" is reported to have appeared in the 1895 hymnal Chanmiga under the title "Jesus, Lord of My Soul" (「예수 내 령혼령 주」). It was revised several times thereafter and has been sung under its present Korean title since the 1983 Unified Hymnal. His hymns are sung widely regardless of denomination, and publications associated with the Korean Methodist Church have run series presenting new translations of his hymn texts.

Assessment

Charles Wesley is called "the poet of Methodism," but because his hymns are sung across many denominations, he is also regarded as a poet of the whole Christian church. After Charles's death, his brother John remarked that his poetic gift was the least of his merits. His contemporary, the hymn writer Isaac Watts, is said to have judged Charles's poem "Wrestling Jacob" superior to all the verse he himself had written.

His hymns are steeped in the theology of the Wesleyan tradition, with its emphasis on free grace and sanctification; even so, they are notable for their wide use across denominational lines. Some have also criticized aspects of the Korean translations. For example, critics point out that in No. 15 the original sense of "divine love that excels all loves" was rendered simply as "God's great love," losing the nuance of the original.