Praise the Lord who reigns above

Praise the Lord who reigns above. Charles Wesley* (1701–1788). Charles Wesley’s psalm paraphrases are a neglected portion of his poetic works. But, as Henry Fish noted in his edition of Wesley’s psalms, ‘Though Charles Wesley has not always confined himself to the letter of the Psalms which he versified, yet in every case he has embodied the spirit, and in many of them he has kept close to the sense of the original’ (Fish, 1854, pp. vii–viii).  ‘Praise the Lord who reigns above’ first appeared in four  8-line stanzas in the Second Edition of A Collection of Psalms and Hymns (1743). In this significant revision of the 1741 edition, John Wesley* removed a substantial number of texts by...