468 THE METHODIST HYMN-BOOK ILLUSTRATED
Death would be sweeter then, More calm my slumber neath the silent sod, Might I thus live to bless my fellow men,
Or glorify my God !
O Thou whose touch can lend Life to the dead, Thy quickening grace supply, And grant me, swanlike, my last breath to spend
In song that may not die !
Hymn 912. How do Thy mercies close me round!
CHARLES WESLEY (i).
Hymns and Sacred Poems, 1740; Works, i. 306. At Lying Down. The last three verses are omitted.
In ver. 3 Charles Wesley wrote, Nay, He Himself becomes my guard.
Ver. 4 was a well-spring of comfort to Mrs. Jones in the Maria mail-boat disaster (see Hymn 467).
Hymn 913. Omnipresent God ! whose aid.
CHARLES WESLEY (i).
Hymns and Sacred Poems, 1749; Works, v. 8. In Hymns for Believers. At Lying Down. Verses 2, 3, 5 are omitted.
Captain Hawtrey, who was for sixteen years a Wesleyan minister and then became a clergyman in the Church of England, never lost his love for Methodism and for Wesley s hymns. His Bible and hymn-book were constantly placed at his bedside, and in his last illness he asked that this hymn might be read to him. His cousin, Dr. Hawtrey, Provost of Eton, said, His memory lives a perpetual encouragement, an evidence of what Christianity can produce in the mind, of what a Christian with God s help can do. The Rev. John Gay Wilson, who was wonderfully blessed as a winner of souls, spent the last days of a patriarchal life at Redhill. Every night he used to repeat this hymn before he lay down to rest. For many years he lived on the verge of heaven. When I go to rest at night, he said, I know it is uncertain where I shall be in the morning. I am just waiting, trusting, hoping,
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