MS Matthew1

Charles Wesley was sidelined in Bristol for much of 1760–61 with an extended illness. He spent his time writing a series of hymns while reading through the entire Bible. He published the results in 1762 as a two-volume set (see Scripture Hymns). Most of the verse collected in this set were reflective in tone. The short hymns often pick up a single theme evoked by the passage being read, with connections made to current struggles in the Methodist movement. Within a year of issuing the published collection, Wesley decided to do a more extensive collection of this type of hymns on the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. He began with a volume on the Gospel of John in December 1763; moved to Acts of the Apostles in November 1764; then to the Gospel of Matthew, which he finished in March 1766; and wrapped up the Gospels of Mark and Luke in a flurry between March and April of 1766. In each case, Wesley brought most of the hymns he had published in Scripture Hymns for the relevant book over into his larger manuscript volumes—often adapting the original into a longer hymn.2 These inclusions and adaptations are noted below. MS Matthew is a quarto-sized (5.75 x 7.25 inches) bound manuscript volume. It contains 371 numbered pages, on which appear 807 poems. Of these, 203 are reproduced from Scripture Hymns with little alteration, leaving a total of 604 poems that are either new or significant revisions/expansions of earlier material. At the end of the volume (on page 370), Wesley wrote in shorthand “Finished March 8, 1766.” About twenty years later Wesley apparently began to prepare the volume for publication. On the bottom of page 1 is a note in shorthand that he began revising the volume in June 24, 1783. This is followed by notation of a second round of revising begun September 20, 1784. Whatever his intention, the volume remained unpublished at Charles Wesley’s death in March 1788. John Wesley found MS Matthew and the other volumes among his brother’s papers, and began publishing selected hymns in the Arminian Magazine in 1789, with this introduction:

My brother has left several manuscript volumes of short hymns, upon various passages of scripture—particularly on the four gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. Many of these are no ways inferior to those that have been already published. A specimen of them I propose to publish in the ensuing magazines. The whole will probably see the light in some future period.3

It was likely John Wesley who placed an ink cross-mark [+] next to the scripture verse reference of selected hymns throughout the volume, since the hymns so marked for the first 87 pages were all published in the Arminian Magazine between 1789–92. (The editor taking over after John Wesley’s death dropped the series.) We reproduce the “+” whenever it appears in the manuscript, and identify in footnotes the hymns published in the Arminian Magazine. The manuscript has a few instances of a vertical line drawn through a stanza in ink similar to that in which the text was written. While it is not certain, this line was likely drawn by Charles Wesley. By contrast, there are multiple instances in the manuscript where a faint vertical line is drawn through stanzas or entire hymns, in pencil. There are also multiple instances of a capital “O” (for omit?) written in the

1This document was produced by the Duke Center for Studies in the Wesleyan Tradition under editorial direction of Randy L. Maddox, with the diligent assistance of Aileen F. Maddox. Last updated: January 27, 2012. 2There are 278 hymns on Matthew in Scripture Hymns (1762)—one appears in the section on Luke, NT #386. Of these, only four are not included in some form in MS Matthew: #135, #206, #210, and #230. 3Arminian Magazine 12 (1789): 279. margin by hymns, again in pencil. Since both Wesley brothers almost always use ink, we have judged these marks to be by a later hand and have not annotated them.4 George Osborn published many of the hymns in MS Matthew in Poetical Works. Unfortunately, he i