Father, whose everlasting love

Father, whose everlasting love. Charles Wesley* (1707-88). First published in Hymns on God’s Everlasting Love (1741) in seventeen 4-line stanzas. It was printed in full in the Arminian Magazine, 1788, but not in John Wesley’s A Collection of Hymns for the use of the People called Methodists (1780), to which it was added in 1808. It is usually shortened to five or six stanzas. The occasion for the writing and printing of Hymns on God’s Everlasting Love was to make clear the Wesleys’ opposition to Calvinistic ideas of reprobation and election; and this hymn in print today in its shortened form gives a very different impression from its first appearance as a blazing manifesto of God’s...