1   THY ceaseless, unexhausted love,
    Unmerited and free,
    Delights our evil to remove,
    And help our misery.

2   Thou waitest to be gracious still;
    Thou dost with sinners bear,
    That, saved, we may thy goodness feel,
    And all thy grace declare.

3   Thy goodness and thy truth to me,
    To every soul, abound,
    A vast, unfathomable sea,
    Where all our thoughts are drowned.

4   Its streams the whole creation reach,
    So plenteous is the store,
    Enough for all, enough for each,
    Enough for evermore.

5   Faithful, O Lord, thy mercies are,
    A rock that cannot move!
    A thousand promises declare
    Thy constancy of love.

6   Throughout the universe it reigns,
    Unalterably sure;
    And while the truth of God remains,
    The goodness must endure.¹

John Wesley will be remembered frequently and diversely in this his 300th birthday year. Much of that remembering will function programmatically, even ideologically, as today's Methodists claim from him that aspect, commitment, belief, or institution they hold most dear or seek to impose. Such appeals take us, on behalf of that cherished ideal, back to John Wesley, back to a time when, with Wesley, we got things right.

Methodists tend to such reversions to Wesley, even without a birthday. "Wesley said" revisionism, apologetical citations, proof-texting, and other primitivist efforts to roll back the clock amuse colleagues from other denominations. They find our effort to return to the eighteenth century quaint and unpersuasive; but we do it nonetheless. And I will admit to having done my share. Historians, after all, live by and in the past.

Conscious of the temptation, I will use the discipline of Charles Wesley hymns to orient me to classic emphases of the Wesleys. Charles Wesley put into verse the theology, ethics, discipline, and mission of the Methodist movement, and the Wesleys and American Methodism after them wanted the hymnbook in the pocket of the faithful. Indeed, from the beginning, our hymns and hymnbooks functioned, as Charles and John Wesley prescribed, as "a little body of experimental and practical divinity," and provided a lyric version of the commitments of Methodism. Beginning in 1780 the Wesleys structured the Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists as a pathway to salvation, a Methodist guide to living the Christian life. For several decades American hymnals preserved the soteriological Wesleyan formatting. Even without that structure and through the years, the Wesleyan hymns have been identified as bearer of our Methodist doctrine (even as each new hymnal omitted successively more of them).

In the above I would call attention to the following Wesleyan emphases:

• Love, God's love, as sovereign, "ceaseless," relentless, patient, triumphing, "unexhausted";
• Grace as unmerited and free;
• The atonement as general, universal, creation-wide;
• A goodness that can reach, inform, and animate us, individually and personally;
• Such acceptance, such prevenient activity of God, despite, indeed in the face of and because of human sin, evil, and corruption;
• A redemption that reaches the whole creation, the whole created order — enough for all, enough for each, enough for evermore;
• God's faithfulness to God's promises — "Thy constancy of love";
• Our response in faith, hope, and love as divinely given, divinely resourced, divinely sustained — justifying and sanctifying as well as converting grace;
• The mandate to declare this God's gift, this promise, to all humankind, an imperative both individual and personal AND universal, social, and communal;
• Truth as doxological, relational, existential, eschatological, and redemptive, making claims both cosmic and personal and always Trinitarian, if sometimes as here, implicitly so;
• The claim of such truth on the whole self, knitting the cognitive, the volitional, and the affective together and God's saving work in Christ as holistic and social;
• A calling then, left implicit above but clear in the following familiar hymn, to personal holiness and love of neighbor, to a disciplined life, to stewardship, to a covenanted journeying in concert with others, to appropriate adherence to God's law, to works of piety and of mercy, to a life in the Spirit.

Scripture underpinned these emphases and vibrated through the Wesley verse. The focus often fell, as here, on the salvific doctrines but presupposed the central affirmations of orthodox Christianity.

The hymnbook as a whole canvassed the whole of Christian experience, moving from sin to salvation, and providing resources for the increasingly disciplined and structured Methodist impulse. It served as a handbook for the covenanted, a guide to the Christian life, and was to be used for private devotion and in class, society, and conference.

The hymns summarized Wesleyan belief and shaped Methodist practice. Thankfully the publication of A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists in the Bicentennial edition of The Works of John Wesley makes available once more the richness of this testimony, the following being one of the few left in our current hymnbook to reflect the theological richness of the Wesley verse:

S.M. Leviticus viii.35

1   A CHARGE to keep I have,
    A God to glorify,
    A never-dying soul to save,
    And fit it for the sky;
    To serve the present age,
    My calling to fulfil:
    O may it all my powers engage
    To do my Master's will!

2   Arm me with jealous care,
    As in thy sight to live;
    And O thy servant, Lord, prepare
    A strict account to give!
    Help me to watch and pray,
    And on thyself rely,
    Assured, if I my trust betray,
    I shall for ever die.²

^1. From The Works of John Wesley, Volume 7, A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (Nashville: Abingdon, 1983), pp. 382-83.

^2. Ibid., page 465. This hymn, #413, also appears in The United Methodist Hymnal.

Russel E. Richey is Dean and Professor of Church History, Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. He is co-editor (with Rowe, Rowe, and Schmidt) of The Methodist Experience in America, (Abingdon, 2000).