A Hymn Of Grace: Where Shall My Wond’ring Soul Begin?

1 Where shall my wond’ring soul begin? [1]
How shall I all to heaven aspire?
A slave redeemed from death and sin,
A brand plucked from eternal fire,
How shall I equal triumphs raise,
Or sing my great Deliverer’s praise?

2 O how shall I the goodness tell,
Father, which thou to me hast showed?
That I, a child of wrath and hell,
I should be called a child of God!
Should know, should feel my sins forgiven,
Blest with this antepast [2] of heaven!

3 And shall I slight my Father’s love?
Or basely fear his gifts to own?
Unmindful of his favours prove?
Shall I, the hallowed cross to shun,
Refuse his righteousness t’impart
By hiding it within my heart?

4 No, though the ancient dragon rage,
And call forth all his host to war;
Though earth’s self-righteous sons engage,
Them and their god alike I dare:
Jesus the sinner’s friend proclaim,
Jesus, to sinners still the same.

5 Outcasts of men,
to you I call, Harlots, and publicans, and thieves!
He spreads his arms t’embrace you all;
Sinners alone his grace receives:
No need of him the righteous have;
He came the lost to seek and save.

6 Come, O my guilty brethren, come,
Groaning beneath your load of sin;
His bleeding heart shall make you room,
His open side shall take you in.
He calls you now, invites you home—
Come, O my guilty brethren, come.

7 For you the purple current flowed
In pardons from his wounded side;
Languished for you th’eternal God,
For you the Prince of glory died.
Believe, and all your sin’s forgiven,
Only believe-and yours is heaven! [3]

—Charles Wesley (1707–1788)

In terms of both quantity and quality of Christian hymnody, Charles Wesley is unrivalled in history. Only Isaac Watts comes anywhere close to Wesley, and that is only as measured by the criterion of quality. According to Dr. Frank Baker, one of the world authorities on Wesleyana, Charles Wesley left behind at least 8,989 hymns ! [4] The same authority owned that Wesley produced “27,000 stanzas and 180,000 lines. This is something like three times the output of … William Wordsworth, and even more than that of the redoubtable Robert Browning …. Taking the average … Charles Wesley wrote ten lines of verse every day for 50 years, completing an extant poem every other day.” [5]

Charles and John Wesley were converted several days apart from each other in 1738. The hymn mentioned below is very likely his conversion hymn referred to in Charles’s Journal for Tuesday, May 23, 1738: “At nine I began an hymn upon my conversion, but was persuaded to break off for fear of pride. Mr. Bray coming encouraged me to proceed in spite of Satan. I prayed Christ to stand by me, and finished the hymn.” The next evening, on the day of John’s conversion, Charles wrote: “Towards ten my brother was brought in triumph by a troop of our friends, and declared, “I believe.” We sang the hymn with great joy, and parted with prayer.

In the fifth stanza of our current hymn of grace Charles wrote: “Sinners alone his [i.e., God’s] grace receives [sic].” He certainly is in accord with the Protestant Reformation in the last couplet:

“Believe, and all your sin’s forgiven,
Only believe—and yours is heaven!”

Notice also that Wesley captures the exhilarating spirit of grace in the parallelism registered in the first two stanzas. Each starts with a question”Where … ? How … ?”-and each is followed in lines 3 and 4 by a backdrop of sin and its consequences. Amazingly, stanza 5 was almost prophetic, since the disgraced “harlots, and publicans, and thieves” were to become the clientele of these outdoors preachers who offered lifechanging grace to the unchurched.

This hymn bears the distinctive hallmarks of a Charles Wesley hymn. A first trademark is the emotional and experiential element. For instance, “Should know, should feel my sins forgiven” (stanza 2). Secondly, it is peppered with personal pronouns. Observe that in the final stanza “for you” appears three times. If God “spreads his arms, t’embrace you all” (stanza 5), then God’s grace is “for you.” Charles Wesley had the genius of making God’s amazing grace experiential and personal.

Notes

1. I have asked my friend Jim Townsend, Bible Editor for the David C. Cook Publishing Company, to choose and comment upon a Charles Wesley hymn because he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on “Feelings Related to Assurance in Charles Wesley’s Hymns” (Fuller Theological Seminary). While neither of us can agree with all of Wesley’s teachings, we certainly laud his great stress on grace. Ed.
2. Archaic for foretaste, that is, a first course to whet the appetite.
3. The Works of John Wesley, Edited by Franz Hildebrandt and Oliver A. Becherlegge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 7:116, 117.
4. Representative Verse of Charles Wesley, ed. by Frank Baker (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1962), xi.
5. Ibid.