Charles Wesley

The eighteenth of Samuel and Susanna Wesley's nineteen children, Charles was born in 1707 in the Epworth rectory that would become the symbolic birthplace of Methodism. He had his brother John's seriousness without, for much of his life, his brother's willingness to be uncomfortable. He studied at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he founded the 'Holy Club' — a small group of earnest undergraduates meeting for Bible study, fasting, prison visitation, and regular communion — that John later joined and, inevitably, led. The Methodist nickname came from the club's methodical piety; Charles coined it or received it first depending on whose account you trust.

The conversion experience came on Pentecost Sunday, May 21, 1738. Charles was bedridden with pleurisy in the London home of a tradesman named John Bray. He had been a devout, striving, morally serious Anglican for years; he was not converted. The Moravian tradition that both Wesleys were encountering through Peter Böhler pressed a different question: not whether you are trying, but whether you know that you are forgiven. On that Pentecost Sunday, by his own journal account, he did. He reached for a pen immediately and wrote 'Where shall my wondering soul begin?' — the first of what would eventually number more than 6,500 hymns. Three days later John had his own Aldersgate experience, heart 'strangely warmed.' The brothers had, in their different emotional registers, come home.

The theological content of the hymns is what matters most. Charles Wesley did not write devotional poetry with a loose gospel atmosphere; he wrote systematic theology in verse, compressed to the point where congregation could carry it in their mouths and chests across the week. 'And Can It Be' contains one of the clearest statements of substitutionary atonement in English: 'He left his Father's throne above / So free, so infinite his grace / Emptied himself of all but love / And bled for Adam's helpless race.' The fourth stanza — 'Long my imprisoned spirit lay / Fast bound in sin and nature's night / Thine eye diffused a quickening ray / I woke, the dungeon flamed with light' — is Romans 8 and Ephesians 2 in four lines. 'Love Divine, All Loves Excelling' presses into sanctification and eschatological glorification in a way no catechism manages. Hymns on the Lord's Supper (1745) is a sustained sacramental theology in eighty-four poems, drawing on the patristic and Anglican high-church tradition both brothers had been formed in.

Charles was less comfortable with the irregular outdoor preaching that became the Methodist signature, and more instinctively Anglican than John. His marriage in 1749 to Sarah Gwynne settled him into an increasingly stationary role — Bristol until the 1770s, then London. He continued composing, continued preaching occasionally, and watched with growing unease as John's organization pulled the Methodist societies toward a de facto separation from the Church of England. The 1784 ordinations for the American mission — John ordaining superintendents for a church that would become the United Methodist Church — disturbed Charles deeply. He died in 1788, still calling himself a Church of England man, and was buried in the yard of St. Marylebone Parish Church rather than the Wesleyan chapel. The irony is that the tradition he helped create found him uncomfortably Anglican at the end.

Charles Wesley's enduring legacy is precisely the hymns. The Wesleys were not systematic theologians in the academic sense; they were practitioners with strong doctrinal instincts who had to communicate with miners and mill workers who could not read the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Charles's solution was to make the catechism singable. The doctrines of grace — justification by faith alone, the atonement, the new birth, entire sanctification — are all in the hymns, pitched to anyone who could hold a tune and remember a verse. Millions of Christians who cannot name a single Methodist theologian have sung Charles Wesley's account of the cross for three centuries without knowing it. That is the kind of pastoral success that outlasts every institutional arrangement.