Give me the faith which can remove

Give me the faith which can remove. Charles Wesley* (1707-1788). First published in Hymns and Sacred Poems (1749), the book that Charles Wesley published with his brother’s approval in the expectation of his [Charles’s] marriage. The customary text is part of a hymn of eight 6-line stanzas, which began ‘O that I was as heretofore’. The full original text is printed in Frank Baker’s Representative Verse of Charles Wesley (1962), pp. 108-9. The eight-stanza hymn is of considerable interest. It was in a section entitled ‘Hymns for a Preacher of the Gospel’ and began with two stanzas in which Wesley remembered his initial evangelical enthusiasm. It was a time when he would metaphorically rush...