Come, Holy Ghost, all-quickening fire/Come and in me

Come, Holy Ghost, all quickening fire/ Come, and in me.  Charles Wesley* (1707-1788). One of Charles Wesley’s most beautiful hymns, this was first printed in Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739), where it was entitled ‘Hymn to the Holy Ghost’. It had six stanzas, all of which were used, with minor alterations, by John Wesley* in A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists (1780), where it was in the section entitled ‘For Believers Groaning for full Redemption’. Later Wesleyan Methodist books have tended to omit the original stanza 6, which repeated stanza 1. Other books, such as the Wesleyan Methodist Hymn Book (1904) and MHB, omitted stanza 2. The text in 1739 was as...