Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739)

Two thirds of the book that first put Charles Wesley's own hymns into print was not written by either Wesley brother. Hymns and Sacred Poems drew heavily on material John Wesley had already gathered and printed elsewhere, his own earlier Collection of Psalms and Hymns among the sources, plus verse borrowed from writers outside the family circle entirely, George Herbert's devotional poetry and a German Moravian hymnal both among them. John was the collection's primary compiler and editor, choosing what stayed in and what was cut, which is why the surviving evidence of the printing itself, Strahan's press, Hutton's shop, the sale at Mr. Bray's address in London in March 1739, sits more cleanly under his name than his brother's.

What made the book matter historically was the remaining third. Among the new verse the brothers themselves contributed sat Charles Wesley's And Can It Be That I Should Gain, written the year before under the heading Free Grace, the first hymn of his own to reach a printed page. He had composed it to mark his own conversion of May 1738, and its opening wonder at a savior who left his Father's throne above for one particular sinner became, across the centuries that followed, one of the most sung expressions of personal assurance in the English hymn tradition, still placed sixth in a 2013 BBC national survey of Britain's favorite hymns. A borrowed, composite hymnal turned out to be the vehicle for the one new voice inside it that would outlast every source it had leaned on.

Methodism is usually described by its discipline, the small group meetings, the methodical rounds of prayer and self-examination that gave the movement its mocking nickname before its followers embraced it. Hymns and Sacred Poems shows the other half of how the movement actually worked on a person. Rather than argue a doctrine from a pulpit and hope a listener absorbed it, the Wesleys put the doctrine directly into the first person and handed it to the congregation to sing themselves. And Can It Be does not describe someone else's astonishment at grace, it performs the singer's own, marveling that God himself should die for the one singing the words. A worshiper singing it is not being told what assurance of salvation feels like, they are rehearsing the sensation of having it, verse by verse, in their own voice, alongside everyone else in the room doing the same thing.

That was the specific theological argument early Methodism was making against much of the Protestantism around it, that a believer could know their own salvation with confidence rather than spend a lifetime hoping for it without certainty. A sermon can assert that claim. A hymn a congregation sings together, using the first person the whole time, puts the congregation in the position of asserting it about themselves, together, every time they sing. That mechanism, doctrine delivered as personal testimony set to a singable tune, is what later generations meant when they said Methodism was born in song as much as in preaching, and Hymns and Sacred Poems, however patched together from other people's material, is where that particular voice first reached print.