Blow ye the trumpet, blow

Blow ye the trumpet, blow. Charles Wesley* (1707-1788). First published as Hymn III in Hymns for New-Year’s-Day (Bristol, 1750), with no title, in six 6-line stanzas with the last two lines as a refrain, ‘The Year of Jubilee is come;/ Return, ye ransom’d Sinners, home!’. The last stanza changed the final line to ‘Return to your Eternal Home’ (as in UMH). As Young points out ‘The Year of Jubilee’ refers to Leviticus 25: 9-10, in which ‘after seven sabbatical years (7 x 7 = 49), the next, the fiftieth year, was to be a year of jubilee’ (Young, 1993, p. 242). The passage from Leviticus has many features that Wesley gladly adopted as metaphors of the spiritual life, such as the sounding of the...