O thou who camest from above

I can't really understand how it is that I've been writing this blog for nearly four months and I haven't yet included a hymn by Charles Wesley!  John Julian writes that Charles Wesley "is said to have written no less than 6500 hymns".  According to Wikipedia, Singing the Faith (the current authorised hymn book of the Methodist Church in the UK) includes 89 hymns by Wesley, out of a total of 748.  Even Ancient and Modern: Hymns and Songs for Refreshing Worship (the most recent edition of the traditional Anglican hymn book) includes 24 of Wesley's hymns out of a total of 847 - the only two authors who have more in that book are Timothy Dudley-Smith at 41, and John Bell at 33.

Charles Wesley was the 18th of 19 children born to Rev Samuel Wesley, Rector of Epworth in Lincolnshire, and his wife Susanna.   Eight of his siblings had already died, and at his birth in December 1707, it looked as if baby Charles would quickly follow them to the grave.  But the Lord clearly had other ideas!

The Wesley children received a thorough education in the Christian faith from their mother, and Charles and his sister Mehetabel (Hetty) inherited their father's gift for poetry, as did (to a lesser extent) their brothers Samuel and John.

Charles graduated from his mother's home school to Westminster School in 1716, and went up to Oxford in 1726.  While he was a student, he decided (in the words of Faith Cook, Our Hymn Writers and their Hymns, [Darlington, Evangelical Press, 2005/2015], p 99) "to give up the light-hearted company he had been enjoying and devote himself to the pursuit of a life pleasing to God."  He spent approximately the next 10 years trying to please God by his own efforts, to earn his salvation.  He was ordained into the ministry of the Church of England in 1735, and travelled with his brother John as a missionary to Georgia, although he soon returned to England.  It was on Sunday 21 May 1738 (by the pre-1752 Julian calendar) that he says in his journal,

I now found myself at peace with God, and rejoiced in hope of loving Christ . . . I saw that by faith I stood; by the continual support of faith kept from falling, though by myself I am ever sinking into sin (quoted by Faith Cook, op cit, pp 99-100).

Charles very quickly began to express the joy of his new-found spiritual freedom in verse, and continued to do so until the end of his life.

O thou who camest from above was published by Charles Wesley in 1762 in a book called Short Hymns on Select Passages of the Holy Scriptures.  According to S T Kimbrough, John Wesley usually edited Charles' poetry before it was published, but this publication was an exception.  Kimbrough describes Short Hymns as "a collage of Biblical allusions", beginning with Genesis and working through to Revelation.

John Julian, Vol 1, p 852 points out that O thou who camest from above originally appeared in two verses of eight lines each (as shown here - scroll to p 66 of the PDF), rather than the four verses of four lines with which we're more familiar today.  However, looking the page scans on Hymnary.org (the earliest dated 1797), it seems that the four verse arrangement quickly became more usual.  It's one of a series of hymns inspired by texts from Leviticus.  The particular verse shown with this hymn is Leviticus 6:13: Fire shall be kept burning on the altar continually; it shall not go out (ESV).  In the hymn, Charles uses this image, but the fire becomes 'sacred love' burning 'on the mean altar of my heart', to the Lord's glory.  Rather than the burnt-offering which is the context for the Leviticus passage, the sacrifice in the hymn is the life of the believer, in his or her work, speech, thought, use of gifts, doing the Lord's perfect will in acts of faith and love. 

It seems that many people had a problem with the word 'inextinguishable' in the sixth line of the hymn.  Bishop E H Bickersteth commented in The Hymnal Companion to the Book of Common Prayer (see here):

The Editor believes that this admirable hymn would have been far more popular if it had not been for the very long word "inextinguishable."  Words of five syllables must be admitted into hymns sparingly; but for a whole congregation to be poised on six, practically leads to a hymn being passed by.   

The United Methodist Church 'History of Hymns' entry states that John Wesley himself edited this line to read, 'There let it for thy glory burn with ever bright undying blaze.'  So if Charles hadn't published Short Hymns independently of his brother, we might never have known the original!
I can't say I've ever found it to be a problem!  The hymn books with which I was familiar in the 1980s and early 1990s, when I first sang this hymn, all use Charles Wesley's original word.   I love the sense of the Lord kindling a flame of love on my heart and keeping it burning, the sense of committing my whole life 'in humble prayer and fervent praise', looking forward to the day when 'death thy endless mercies seal'.  None of these things would be possible without the Lord working by his Spirit in my heart and mind and life.

Given that Charles published O thou who camest from above independently from his brother John, it's fascinating to read the following in 'A Sketch of Mr Wesley's Character' by the Rev Samuel Bradburn (scroll to p 20), which was published in 1791 as an introduction to John Wesley's Select Letters, Chiefly on Personal Religion:

His modesty prevented his saying much of his own experience . . . he did not, when speaking of doctrines, produce himself as an evidence . . . Yet he was sufficiently explicit among his friends.  He told me, when with him in Yorkshire, in the year 1781, that "his experience might almost any time be found in the following lines:-

O Thou who camest from above,

The pure celestial fire t'impart,

Kindle a flame of sacred love

On the mean altar of my heart!

There let it for thy glory burn

With inextingishable blaze,

And trembling to its source return,

In humble love and fervent praise."

On another occasion, according to Edwin D Mouzon in The Fundamentals of Methodism (p 68), 

The nearest [John Wesley] is known to have come to professing [that he'd attained perfect love] was when to the question whether he had ever experienced the blssing of perfect love he replied by quoting Charles Wesley's hymn:

Jesus, confirm my heart's desire,
To work, and speak, and think, for thee;
Still let me guard the holy fire,
And still stir up thy gift in me;

Ready for all thy perfect will,
My acts of faith and love repeat,
Till death thy endless mercies seal,
And make the sacrifice complete. 

Faith Cook (op cit, p 114) comments that 'it is thought that Charles usually composed his words with a tune in mind.'  It would be interesting to discover whether that is the case for O thou who camest from above, and what that tune might have been.  For me, the only tune to which I remember singing these words is Hereford which was composed by Charles Wesley's grandson, Samuel Sebastian Wesley, and which seems to fit the words perfectly. 

There's a lyric video here, sung to the tune Hereford.  A Youtube search will show up videos of this hymn sung to other tunes, such as Wilton or Stopford.