Whoever sings “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” at Christmas or “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing” in a worship service is unlikely to know they learned theology from an eighteenth century English clergyman. Charles Wesley wrote thousands of hymns that crossed centuries and languages, teaching the faith through song before it was taught in books.
He was born on December 18, 1707, in Epworth, England, the son of the clergyman Samuel Wesley and Susanna Wesley, and the youngest of the couple’s sons who survived infancy. He studied at Westminster School in London and later at Christ Church, Oxford, where he distinguished himself by translating classical Greek and Latin poets into English.
In 1729, still a student at Oxford, he gathered a few classmates into a small group devoted to fasting, prayer, and visiting prisoners. The strictness of their routine earned the group the mocking nickname of Methodists, a term his older brother John Wesley would later adopt as the name of the movement that would emerge a decade later.
In 1735, Charles accompanied John to the colony of Georgia in America as secretary of Indian affairs to Governor James Oglethorpe and chaplain of Fort Frederica. The mission was brief and bitter: his rigidity displeased the colonists, and he returned to England less than a year later, ill and discouraged by the failure.
On May 21, 1738, Pentecost Sunday, ill at a friend’s house in London, he found the assurance of faith he had been seeking for days while reading Luther’s commentary on Galatians. He wrote in his journal: “I now found myself at peace with God, and rejoiced in hope of loving Christ.”
In the years that followed, he began composing hymns by the thousands, among them “And Can It Be” and “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” published with John in Hymns and Sacred Poems. Over his lifetime, he wrote more than six thousand texts, many of them still sung in worship services around the world.
He married Sarah Gwynne in 1749, in Wales; two of his sons, Charles and Samuel, became respected organists and composers. Unlike John, Charles never stopped seeing himself as an Anglican priest and openly disagreed when his brother began ordaining preachers on his own authority for America, fearing a break with the Church, a friction that marked the last years of the relationship between the two brothers.
He died on March 29, 1788, in London, asking the parish priest to bury him as a faithful member of the Church of England. His hymns, however, crossed denominational boundaries: they remain, today, translated into dozens of languages, teaching the faith through song to new generations in churches around the world.
