Jesus, we thus obey

Jesu(s), we thus obey. Charles Wesley* (1707-1788). First published in Hymns on the Lord’s Supper (1745) in four 8-line stanzas, in the section entitled ‘As it [the Sacrament] is a Sign and a Means of Grace’ (based on Part IV of Daniel Brevint’s The Christian Sacrament and Sacrifice, Oxford, 1673, ‘Concerning the Sacrament, as it is a Means of Grace’). It was not included in John Wesley’s A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists (1780), nor in the 1831 and 1876 supplements to the Collection, but was re-introduced to Methodists in MHB (1933), in five 4-line stanzas, thus omitting twelve lines of the original, and with considerable deviation from the original text. It...