Wesley Corpus

All in All (1761)1 Baker List, 243 Editorial Introduction: The relationship between John and Charles Wesley was strained through the 1750s, due in part to Charles's intervention in John's courtship of Grace Murray. Disagreement over use of the lay preachers added to the tension. Then, at the turn of the decade, a number of Methodist followers in London began claiming that they had received the blessing of instantaneous Christian perfection. While John encouraged these testimonies at first, Charles was suspicious from the beginning. He considered verbal claims to perfection to be vain boasting, maintaining that the truly perfect would testify only of their dependence upon Christ. As he put it in the closing stanza of his hymn "The Promise of Sanctification" (1741), they would "Be less than nothing in God's sight, And feel that Christ is all in all." Charles's concern about the perfectionist controversy is likely what led him to publish (anonymously) in 1761 a volume of hymns selected from earlier publications: Hymns for Those to Whom Christ is All in All (note the echo of his 1741 hymn in the title). This publication is unusual. Charles typically left it to John to publish selected hymn collections. It is even more striking because John issued a collection himself the same year: Select Hymns (1761). A perusal of the preface and the hymns in All in All make clear an underlying concern about the perfectionist controversy. This undertone helps explain why John Wesley tended to ignore All in All, though he did include in Hymns (1780) a few hymns that Charles had crafted by excerpting larger pieces. Textual comparison makes clear that Charles drew from the 1756 editions of HSP (1739), HSP (1740), and HSP (1742). He was likely drawing from similar recent printings of HLS (1745), HSP (1749), and Redemption Hymns (1747), but there are no relevant textual variants to confirm a specific edition. In general, Charles made minimal editorial changes when incorporating text from these sources. His most common change was to substitute "thine" for "thy" in occurrences before words with an initial vowel or "h." He adopted this grammatical practice about 1745 and edited earlier works accordingly. There are similar instances of substituting "mine" for "my." Such stylistic changes are incorporated in the text below without annotation. The text also incorporates all cases where Charles has corrected metre or opted for alternative words.