Wesley Corpus

Hymns for Children (1763)1 Baker list, 258 Editorial Introduction: When John Wesley visited the German Moravians at Herrnhut, he made note of an item (12) in their constitution: "Our little children we instruct chiefly by hymns; whereby we find the most important truths most successfully insinuated into their minds" (see his Journal, 11-14 Aug. 1738). Encouraged by this precedent, John Wesley published a short volume of Hymns for Children (1747), including nine hymns drawn from HSP (1740), CPH (1741), and HSP (1742). Seven of the hymns included by John Wesley in Hymns for Children (1743) were written by his brother Charles, showing their shared interest in hymns for children. Indeed, five of the hymns came from a set of seven to which Charles assigned that name in HSP (1742), 194-202. Similar hymns are scattered through Charles's manuscript collections of verse from the early 1740s on. Moreover, he had considered gathering these into a separate volume from at least 1750. On January 29 of that year he wrote to Mrs. Mary Jones, of Fonmon Castle, Wales, that he was preparing a hymn-book for the students at Kingswood school. His plans for publishing this hymn-book were apparently delayed. A decade later, in a letter to his wife dated January 5, 1760, Charles again announced his intention to publish his "hymns for children" (almost certainly now gathered into a manuscript volume). But once again he was delayed. He developed a serious case of gout, from which he would take two years to recover. He devoted this time to Scripture Hymns (1762). Then, in early 1763, he finally published his own Hymns for Children. This collection gathered together several different types of verse prepared by Charles over the two decades. The first thirty hymns follow closely the outline of the catechism Instructions for Children, which John Wesley published in 1745 (drawing on the work of Claude Fleury Pierre Poiret). It is hard to imagine a more obvious use of the form of hymns to "insinuate the most important truths" into the minds of children! Moving on, in hymns 40-50 we surely encounter the core of the hymn-book that Charles was preparing in 1750 for the students at Kingswood School.