Charles Wesley (1707-1788)

Westminster School and Christ Church: the making of a classical scholar

Charles Wesley was born on 18 December 1707 (Julian calendar) at the Epworth rectory in Lincolnshire, the eighteenth child of Samuel Wesley and Susanna Wesley, and the third of their sons to reach adulthood, after Samuel Jr. and John^[7]. In 1716 he entered Westminster School in London, where he was elected a King's Scholar in 1721 and became head boy in 1725^[8]. He continued his studies at Christ Church, Oxford, where he took his Master of Arts in 1733^{[9] [10]}.

1729: Charles founds the piety circle that becomes the "Holy Club"

In spring 1729, while his brother John was still serving as curate at Epworth and Wroot, Charles gathered two or three young students at Oxford around a methodical rule of life — weekly communion, fasting, daily study of the Scriptures according to the university statutes^[11]. The Dictionary of National Biography is explicit about Charles's priority in this foundation:

"By the spring of 1729 he had persuaded two or three young scholars to accompany him and to observe the method of study prescribed by the statutes of the university [...] this gained him the harmless name of Methodist." — Dictionary of National Biography, art. "Wesley, Charles (1707-1788)"^[12]

The DNB holds this priority to be established, citing in support Charles's own letter to Thomas Bradbury Chandler of 28 April 1785^[13]. This version must however be set alongside its challenge: the historian Richard P. Heitzenrater observes that in May 1729 there was as yet no constituted group, and that the nickname "Holy Club" itself is attested only later^[14]. John Wesley, then away from Oxford, returned only in November 1729 and at once took the group's leadership, impressing on the small circle the more systematic discipline that would earn it its various mocking nicknames, including "Holy Club" and "Methodists"^{[15] [16]}. The article therefore holds a nuanced position: Charles's initial step in spring 1729 (a few students gathered around a rule of study) is attested by his own letter of 1785, but without deciding that it was already a constituted group in Heitzenrater's sense — instead of simply repeating, after the challenge, the DNB's categorical version. For the detail of the group's rule of life and its part in the genesis of organized Methodism, see the article on John Wesley (1703-1791).

Secretary for Indian Affairs to Governor Oglethorpe

Ordained deacon then priest of the Church of England in October 1735^[17], Charles Wesley sailed on 14 October 1735 aboard the Simmonds from Gravesend, together with his brother John, for the infant colony of Georgia^[18]. There he was appointed secretary for Indian Affairs to Governor James Oglethorpe and given the pastoral charge of Fort Frederica on St. Simons Island, where he landed on 9 March 1736^{[19] [20]}. On the spot, his liturgical rigour — refusal to recognize baptism administered by a layman, insistence on strict sacramental discipline — provoked sharp resistance among the settlers, little inclined to such exacting standards^{[21] [22]}.

A curtailed ministry: illness and the break with Oglethorpe

Weakened by illness and increasingly at odds with Governor Oglethorpe himself, Charles left Savannah on 26 July 1736 in very poor health and, after calls at Charlestown and Boston, landed at Deal, England, on 3 December 1736^[23]. His effective stay in Georgia lasted only five months, against nearly two years for John, who would return only in February 1738 after the still more resounding failure of his own mission at Savannah — an episode already treated in the article on John Wesley^[24].

Ill in the home of John Bray, a poor Little Britain craftsman

Back in London, exhausted and gravely ill with pleurisy, Charles Wesley was lodged from May 1738 with John Bray, a humble brazier of Little Britain whose simple and lively piety left a lasting impression on the young clergyman^[25]. On 17 May 1738, confined to bed, he began reading Martin Luther's commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, noting in his Journal that he "laboured, waited, and prayed to feel 'who loved me, and gave himself for me'" — a quotation of Galatians 2:20^[26].

The Journal's account: "In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, arise, and believe"

On the morning of Whit Sunday, 21 May 1738, John Wesley and friends came to sing a hymn to the Holy Spirit at his bedside. Shortly afterwards, as he was settling to rest, Charles heard a voice enter his room and speak these words, which he first wrongly attributed to Mrs Musgrave before learning they had in fact come from a certain Mrs Turner:

"In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, arise, and believe, and thou shalt be healed of all thy infirmities." — Words reported in the Journal of Charles Wesley, 21 May 1738^[27]

Mrs Turner herself, questioned at once by Charles who had rung to verify, is said to have confirmed the scene in terms preserved in the Methodist archives:

"It was I, a weak, sinful creature, spoke; but the words were Christ's: he commanded me to say them, and so constrained me that I could not forbear." — Mrs Turner, as reported in the Journal of Charles Wesley, 21 May 1738^[28]

Charles then notes that he found peace: "I now found myself at peace with God, and rejoice in hope of loving Christ"^[29]. This experience came exactly three days before John's at Aldersgate Street (24 May 1738). Charles's Journal establishes no causal link between the two events: the article keeps to this chronological succession and to the spiritual climate common to both brothers during those weeks of May 1738, without generalizing to the whole of Methodist sources, which the cited note does not allow to survey^[30].

"Where shall my wondering soul begin": the first hymn of the conversion

Two days later, on 23 May 1738, Charles set about putting his conversion into verse, not without hesitation, as he confides himself:

"At nine I began a hymn on my conversion, but was persuaded to break off for fear of pride. Mr Bray, coming in, encouraged me to proceed in spite of Satan. I prayed Christ to stand by my side, and finished the hymn." — Charles Wesley, Journal, 23 May 1738^[31]

The Journal for 23 May mentions this hymn without giving its title; John Julian identifies it — a probable identification, not documentary certainty — with the text published in the 1739 Hymns and Sacred Poems under the title "Christ the Friend of Sinners", commonly held to be Charles Wesley's very first hymn, though no independent piece separately establishes this primacy:

"Where shall my wondering soul begin? How shall I all to heaven aspire? A slave redeemed from death and sin, a brand plucked from eternal fire, how shall I equal triumphs raise, and sing my great deliverer's praise?" — Charles Wesley, Where Shall My Wondering Soul Begin, Hymns and Sacred Poems, 1739^[32]

The image of the "brand plucked from the burning" (Zechariah 3:2) which Charles applies here to himself is the one by which, according to the family tradition reported in the article on John Wesley, his mother Susanna is said to have designated little John saved from the Epworth rectory fire of 1709. No listed family document allows, in the present article, the precise attribution to Susanna, its moment of use or the intended parallel between the two brothers to be established: a mere cross-reference to the other article does not suffice for this attribution. The parallel proposed here between the two brothers' uses of the same biblical image therefore remains a hypothesis of the editors' reading, not an established historical fact.

An unheard-of fruitfulness: between six and nine thousand hymns in half a century

The figure of 8,989 hymns and religious poems is the one reported by the Christian History Institute and Christianity Today, attributing it to the Methodist historian Frank Baker (an average of ten lines of religious verse a day for more than fifty years, ten times more than Isaac Watts) — a reported figure, not a primary calculation personally verified by the present article^[33]. To be distinguished from it, without reconciling them arithmetically: the pieces actually published, of which the digital critical edition of the Center for Studies in the Wesleyan Tradition at Duke University lists about 4,400 distinct poems and hymns appearing in Charles Wesley's lifetime, apart from the manuscript material left unpublished; the reprintings in later collections; and the output actually sung in his lifetime, which the cited relay does not allow to be put at 6,500 hymns "collected and sung" — this wording is withdrawn^[34].

The great collections, from 1739 to 1747

This table lists the principal collections, including those published under both brothers' names — the Hymns and Sacred Poems and the 1746 Whitsuntide volume — and not Charles's own collections alone; it excludes, on the other hand, the later re-editions compiled in the official Methodist hymnals from 1780 onwards^{[35] [36] [37]}.

"Veiled in flesh the Godhead see": Hark! The Herald Angels Sing and the theology of the Incarnation (1739)

Published in 1739 as Hark How All the Welkin Rings in the ten four-line stanzas of a "Hymn for Christmas-Day", this hymn carries one of the densest Christological affirmations in the whole Wesleyan corpus:

"Veil'd in Flesh, the Godhead see, Hail th' Incarnate Deity, Pleas'd as Man with Men t'appear, Jesus our Emmanuel here." — Charles Wesley, Hymn for Christmas-Day, Hymns and Sacred Poems, 1739, in the original wording ("Pleas'd as Man with Men t'appear, / Jesus our Emmanuel here"); the later reading "Pleased as man with men to dwell", attached by Hymnology Archive to Kempthorne's revision (1810), is set aside here in favour of the 1739 text alone^[38]

The text affirms without qualification the full divinity of Christ united to his full humanity in the one person of the incarnate Word — in doctrinal consonance with the Christological definition of Chalcedon, on the precise argument of Frost and Chilcote, without being a near-literal restatement of it^[39]. It was George Whitefield who, in his 1753 collection A Collection of Hymns for Social Worship, changed the first line to "Hark! the Herald Angels sing, Glory to the new-born King!", dropped two stanzas and retouched several others — alterations which Charles Wesley, according to hymnological tradition, can hardly have appreciated^[40]. The tune universally associated with the hymn today, borrowed from a movement of Felix Mendelssohn's secular Festgesang (1840), was fitted to the words only in 1855 by the English organist William Hayman Cummings, more than sixty years after Charles Wesley's death^[41].

Christ the Lord Is Risen Today: the song of the resurrection (1739)

Composed the same year under the title "Hymn for Easter Day", this hymn celebrates in eleven original four-line stanzas Christ's paschal triumph:

"Christ the Lord is risen today, sons of men and angels say; raise your joys and triumphs high; sing, ye heavens, and earth, reply. Love's redeeming work is done, fought the fight, the battle won." — Charles Wesley, Hymn for Easter Day, Hymns and Sacred Poems, 1739^[42]

The "Alleluia!" refrain accompanying each line in most hymnals today does not belong to the original 1739 text: it was added later, by an anonymous hand, to fit the Easter Hymn tune with which it is now universally associated^[43].

O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing: the first-anniversary hymn (1739)

Charles Wesley composed this hymn for 21 May 1739 — a Monday on the Julian calendar then in use in England, not a Sunday despite the UMC notice's erroneous indication —, exactly one year after his own conversion: an eighteen-stanza poem originally entitled For the Anniversary Day of One's Conversion, published in the 1740 Hymns and Sacred Poems^[44]. The seventh stanza of this long poem, since become the first stanza of the hymn as sung today, opens with a formula Charles is said to have borrowed from the Moravian missionary Peter Böhler, who reportedly told Wesley: "Had I a thousand tongues, I would praise him with them all"^[45]:

"O for a thousand tongues to sing my great Redeemer's praise, the glories of my God and King, the triumphs of his grace!" — Charles Wesley, O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing, Hymns and Sacred Poems, 1740^[46]

Regularly placed at the head of Methodist hymnals, this hymn holds in particular the first place in the 1989 American Methodist hymnal (The United Methodist Hymnal); the consulted source does not establish that it held this rank in every official Methodist hymnal, and the article keeps to this precise attestation^[47].

And Can It Be: the song of free grace (1739)

Composed in 1738 in the days following his conversion, published in 1739 in the Hymns and Sacred Poems (pp. 117-119) as Free Grace, in six stanzas of six lines, this hymn develops the Pauline theme of unmerited grace:

"And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Savior's blood? Died he for me who caused his pain? For me who him to death pursued? Amazing love! How can it be that thou, my God, shouldst die for me?" — Charles Wesley, And Can It Be That I Should Gain, Hymns and Sacred Poems, 1739^[48]

This hymn, ranked the United Kingdom's sixth favourite hymn in the BBC Songs of Praise survey of 2013, sets to music the Wesleyan doctrine of universal grace offered to every man — the very doctrine which, in John, would fuel the doctrinal break with George Whitefield over Calvinist predestination, already set out in the article on John Wesley^[49].

Love Divine, All Loves Excelling: Christian perfection in a hymn (1747)

Published in 1747 in the collection Hymns for those that Seek, and those that Have Redemption, this four-stanza hymn puts the Wesleyan doctrine of entire sanctification into verse:

"Finish then thy new creation, pure and spotless let us be; let us see thy great salvation perfectly restored in thee; changed from glory into glory, till in heaven we take our place, till we cast our crowns before thee, lost in wonder, love, and praise." — Charles Wesley, Love Divine, All Loves Excelling, Hymns for those that Seek... Redemption, 1747^[50]

The original 1747 line reads "take away our power of sinning"^[51]. The reading "take away our bent to sinning" is found in identified later collections — for example A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the Methodist Episcopal Church, New York, 1849 — without the author or the date of this substitution being established; the 1780 Wesleyan collection, for its part, omits the stanza entirely, so that no "post-1779" dating is retained^[52]. The article deduces from this no "immediate practical impeccability": such a thesis would require historical demonstration and a definition, not a deduction drawn from a single line — all the more since John Wesley distinguished Christian perfection from the impossibility of falling back, as developed in the article devoted to him.

Jesu, Lover of My Soul: the most intimate hymn (1740)

Published in 1740 as In Temptation, this more personally wrought hymn opens thus^[53]:

"Jesus, lover of my soul, let me to thy bosom fly, while the nearer waters roll, while the tempest still is high: hide me, O my Savior, hide, till the storm of life is past; safe into the haven guide, O receive my soul at last." — Charles Wesley, Jesu, Lover of My Soul, Hymns and Sacred Poems, 1740, under the title "In Temptation"^[54]

Notably, John Wesley does not retain this hymn in his great Methodist collection of 1780 — an omission which Mark A. Noll relates to John's own judgment, who found the hymn too personal and too sentimental; widely adopted thereafter, it became the second most reprinted text in American hymnals between 1737 and 1960^[55].

The eucharistic hymns of 1745: a high sacramental theology, neither Catholic nor Zwinglian

Published in March 1745, the collection Hymns on the Lord's Supper gathers 166 hymns arranged in six sections — the memorial of the Passion, the sacrament as sign and means of grace, the pledge of heaven, the sacrificial bearing of the Eucharist, the sacrifice of ourselves, thanksgiving after communion — and opens with a long extract from the High-Church Anglican treatise of Daniel Brevint, The Christian Sacrament and Sacrifice (1673)^[56]. The theology displayed there is of an unusual sacramental density for Protestant authors of the eighteenth century:

"No local Deity we worship, Lord, in Thee." — Charles Wesley, Hymns on the Lord's Supper, 1745, hymn 63, stanza 2^[57]

"Who can say how bread and wine God into man conveys? How the bread His flesh imparts, how the wine transmits His blood, fills His faithful people's hearts with all the life of God! [...] Sure and real is the grace, the manner be unknown; only meet us in Thy ways, and perfect us in one." — Charles Wesley, Hymns on the Lord's Supper, 1745, hymn 57, stanza 1 then excerpt of stanza 4, p. 41 (two intermediate stanzas omitted, cut marked by [...])^[58]

The reference study by the historian J. Ernest Rattenbury, The Eucharistic Hymns of John and Charles Wesley (Epworth Press, London, 1948), examined in detail by the Anglican theologian Frank Colquhoun in The Churchman (1949), sums up the two brothers' theological position thus:

"Their sacramental views were as strongly anti-Roman as they were anti-Zwinglian. [...] They resolutely rejected the Roman dogma of transubstantiation [...] And while a doctrine of the 'real Presence' is clearly taught, there is no notion that the Presence is confined to the sacred elements. The Presence of the Lord was sought not in the bread and wine but in the banquet itself, of which He was the presiding Host." — Frank Colquhoun, Charles Wesley's Eucharistic Hymns, The Churchman, vol. 63, no. 2, 1949, citing J. Ernest Rattenbury^[59]

The line quoted above (hymn 63, stanza 2, on grace unconfined to a place) expresses the refusal of a presence shut up within the consecrated elements; it does not by itself demonstrate the rejection of every bodily and abiding presence, and the article no longer presents it as the explicit declaration of such a rejection. It is the interpretation of it given by Colquhoun after Rattenbury — a real presence sung with force, but sought in the banquet itself, of which Christ is the presiding host, rather than in the species — which grounds here the difference with the Catholic faith^[60]. The latter holds a substantial presence of Christ under the species, without bodily localization in the spatial sense (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III, q. 76, a. 5^[61]); and it is by the pertinent texts — chapter IV of Trent's decree on the Eucharist (DS 1642), taken up in the Catechism of the Catholic Church § 1376 — that the real difference with transubstantiation, which the Wesleyan hymns refuse, is demonstrated^{[62] [63]}. Charles Wesley's eucharistic theology thus stands between Catholic sacramental realism and the purely symbolic memorialism of Zwingli — a position which the final section of this article will examine from a Catholic point of view.

The 1749 wedding: a contrast with John's unhappy marriage

Charles met Sarah "Sally" Gwynne, then twenty years old, daughter of the Welsh magistrate Marmaduke Gwynne, during a preaching tour in Wales in 1747^[64]. The two were married on 8 April 1749 at Llanlleonfel church in Breconshire, in a ceremony performed by John Wesley himself, who secured for his brother an annual income of a hundred pounds drawn from the proceeds of the shared publications — not from John's own publications alone — so as to reassure the bride's family^[65]. Unlike John's marriage to Molly Vazeille, which would end in conjugal disaster, the union of Charles and Sarah remained, until his death in 1788, a source of mutual stability and support — it is Sarah who, he having become unable to write, would take down his last verses from his dictation^{[66] [67]}.

Eight children, five graves: bereavement strikes the Wesley home

The couple had eight children, five of whom died in infancy^[68]. Only three children reached adulthood: Charles Wesley Jr. (1757-1834), Sarah "Sally" Wesley, who died at Bristol in 1828, and Samuel Wesley (1766-1837)^[69].

Charles Wesley Jr. and Samuel Wesley: a dynasty of musicians

The two surviving sons proved, from childhood, musical prodigies: Charles Jr. became a renowned organist, while Samuel Wesley, hailed as a child by Dr William Boyce as an "English Mozart", established himself as the greatest organist of his time and a prolific composer^[70]. Samuel's son, Samuel Sebastian Wesley (1810-1876), would continue this line as a composer and organist — a musical posterity which Charles Wesley, who died in 1788, would never know^[71].

"Ordination is separation"

From the 1750s onwards, while John grew ever more accommodating of the canonical irregularities demanded by the movement's growth — lay preachers, chapels unconsecrated by any bishop, then in 1784 ordinations performed on his sole authority as a priest — Charles opposed them with constancy in his last writings. His formula most often cited by historians of Methodism sums up by itself all his substantive disagreement with his brother:

"Ordination is separation." — Formula taken up by Charles Wesley (a remark of Lord Mansfield quoted by Charles in his letter to John of 27 July 1786), relayed by the historiography of the Methodist episcopate^[72]

For Charles, to take the step of ordaining ministers without the concurrence of any bishop was, in effect, to consummate a break with the Established Church which neither he nor John, he believed, had ever willed or sought^[73].

The epigram against the ordination of Thomas Coke (notebook dated c. 1786)

When John ordained, in September 1784, Thomas Coke as "superintendent" of the Methodist societies in America — a gesture already recounted in detail in the article on John Wesley — Charles was not consulted and reacted with biting sharpness. A satirical epigram, preserved in the Methodist archives of the John Rylands Library in Manchester, is attributed to him:

"So easily are Bishops made, by man or woman's whim. Wesley his hands on Coke has laid, but who laid hands on him?" — Charles Wesley, attributed epigram, MS Ordinations manuscript, Methodist Archive and Research Centre, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester^[74]

The text of this epigram (poem V, stanza 1, manuscript page 5 of the MS Ordinations notebook) is given here from the transcription of the Duke Center for Studies in the Wesleyan Tradition, established with the permission of the John Rylands Library; the notebook bears variants and deletions noted by the editors, and the names abbreviated in the manuscript (W[esley], C[oke]) are expanded by the editors^[75]. The poem figures in the reference critical edition of Charles Wesley's unpublished poetry^[76]. Charles is also said to have remarked with resigned sadness that John's great age was the true cause, in his view, of this drift: "Twas Age that made the breach not He"^[77].

Why Charles clings to the historic episcopate

The following table sums up the gap, on this precise question, between the two brothers' positions:

This fidelity of Charles to the historic episcopate, though it remained a minority view with no lasting effect on the course of institutional Methodism, deserves notice: it expresses, in a reformer himself separated from Rome, a sound theological instinct for the importance of an ordered and continuous transmission of the ministry — an instinct which the final section of this article will take up again from a Catholic point of view.

The last hymn, dictated to Sally

Confined to bed in early 1788, too weak to hold a pen himself^[78], Charles Wesley dictated, a few days before his death on 29 March 1788 — not on the very day, contrary to what the previous version indicated: Whitehead, p. 227, places this dictation a few days before the death —, a last six-line stanza to his wife Sarah, who wrote it down at his dictation^[79]:

"In age and feebleness extreme, who shall a sinful worm redeem? Jesus, my only hope Thou art, strength of my failing flesh and heart: O could I catch a smile from Thee, and drop into eternity!" — Charles Wesley, last hymn dictated to his wife a few days before his death (March 1788)^[80]

His physician, Dr Whitehead, would testify to having observed in him, to the very end, "unaffected humility, and holy resignation to the will of God", sustained by "solid hope and unshaken confidence in Christ"^[81].

A deliberately Anglican burial, at Marylebone

Shortly before his death, Charles Wesley is said to have told the rector who came to visit him a last wish that has remained famous in Methodist historiography (the official St Marylebone notice only places this step before the death, without the "moments" precision, which is withdrawn):

"Sir, whatever the world may say of me, I have lived, and I die, a member of the Church of England. I pray you to bury me in your churchyard." — Last words attributed to Charles Wesley, London, March 1788^[82]

In accordance with this wish, he was buried in the churchyard of St Marylebone Parish Church: he had ordered his coffin to be borne by six clergymen of the Church of England^[83], while the hymnological and biographical tradition retains eight effective bearers on the day of the funeral^{[84] [85]} — a deliberate contrast with John, who would be buried three years later in the Methodist ground of Wesley's Chapel in City Road, as the article devoted to him reports^[86].

Several of Charles Wesley's hymns are still sung today far beyond Methodism alone — And Can It Be, O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing, Christ the Lord Is Risen Today, Love Divine, All Loves Excelling and Hark! The Herald Angels Sing commonly feature in Anglican, Presbyterian and Baptist hymnals across the English-speaking world. A taking-up in English-language Catholic collections is plausible and partly documented by the cited relays, but the precise collections, editions and hymn numbers — notably for Catholic use —, as well as the versions actually retained, remain to be identified: the article therefore draws from this diffusion no conclusion as to the doctrinal soundness of the whole^[87]. The classics of English hymnology, from John Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology (1892) to Bernard Manning's Hymns of Wesley and Watts (1942), continue to make Charles Wesley the object of a scholarly study in its own right, distinct from that devoted to his brother John's organizational work^[88].

What a Catholic ear can recognize: a Christological and Trinitarian theology set to song

An honest Catholic reading of Charles Wesley's hymns cannot fail to be struck by their doctrinal soundness on the Trinity and Christ. The affirmation of Christ's full divinity united to his full humanity in Hark! The Herald Angels Sing — "veil'd in flesh, the Godhead see" — is in doctrinal consonance with the Christological definition of Chalcedon, on the precise argument of Frost and Chilcote, without being a near-literal restatement of it^[89]. Likewise, the eucharistic theology of the 1745 Hymns on the Lord's Supper, with its insistence on a real presence of Christ in the sacrament and on the properly sacrificial dimension of the Supper — "we reach by this great instrument the eternal sacrifice"^[90] — testifies to a sacramental instinct far closer to Catholic realism than to the purely symbolic memorialism that would later dominate much of evangelical Protestantism. Nor is it by chance that the Catholic Church recognizes, in separated Christian communities, "many elements of sanctification and of truth" which belong by right to the one Church of Christ and impel towards Catholic unity^[91], and that the Second Vatican Council precisely invites the discernment of such authentic elements among the brethren of the Reformation^[92].

What divides: the absence of transubstantiation and of a valid ministerial priesthood

This closeness of vocabulary must not, however, mask a real doctrinal gap. The line quoted above, in the interpretation of it given by Colquhoun — refusal of a presence confined to the species, a presence sought in the banquet presided over by Christ rather than in the elements themselves — marks the distance with the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, defined as the change of the whole substance of the bread and wine into the substance of the Body and Blood of Christ:

"Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly His Body that He was offering under the species of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God [...] that by the consecration of the bread and of the wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the Body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of His Blood; this change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation." — Council of Trent, 13th session (11 October 1551), Decree on the Most Holy Eucharist, chapter IV (not canon 2), Denzinger-Hünermann no. 1642, cited in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1376^{[93] [94]}

The mode of Christ's presence under the eucharistic species is, for the Catholic Church, unique in its kind and reducible to no other form of spiritual or symbolic presence^[95]. Yet Charles Wesley's eucharistic hymns, lofty as they are, explicitly refuse this substantial and abiding conversion: the presence they sing remains that of a banquet where Christ presides as host, not that of a conversion effected once for all at the consecration^[96]. Likewise, though Charles Wesley, unlike his brother, rejects the validity of the 1784 ordinations, he himself remains, from the Catholic point of view, without a ministerial priesthood valid in the strict sense: ordained according to the reformed Anglican Ordinal of the sixteenth century, whose ordinations Leo XIII declared "absolutely null and utterly void" for defect of form and intention^[97] — the judgment of Apostolicae curae proper to Anglican ordinations and grounded on its distinct motives, which the article maintains. This criterion is not to be confused with full communion: the Church recognizes valid orders in the separated Eastern Churches (Catechism of the Catholic Church § 1399) and validly ordained bishops outside her visible communion (§ 1576); it is the defect of form and intention of the Anglican rite, not separation as such, which grounds here the judgment of invalidity^[98] — a question already developed in detail, apropos of John, in the article devoted to him.

On justification and sanctification — the assurance of pardon received by faith sung from 1738, the grace offered to every man of And Can It Be, the Christian perfection of Love Divine —, the Catholic reader will distinguish: perfection of charity (to grow in the love of God and neighbour, though the Church defines no state of acquired impeccability here below); trust in grace (the assured hope of divine help); the subjective assurance of salvation (the feeling of being pardoned, which Methodism sets up as a normative experience); and the impossibility of sinning (which neither Scripture — "let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall", 1 Cor 10:12; "work out your salvation with fear and trembling", Phil 2:12 — nor the Catholic doctrine of perseverance recognizes in wayfarers). John Wesley himself distinguished perfection from the impossibility of falling back. Charles Wesley speaks here as the hymn-writer of the Methodist revival, never as a Doctor of the Church or a magisterium; his formulas hold as the testimony of a separated tradition, to be received according to the measure of the elements of truth they bear^[99], without the Church having to recognize in them her own doctrine of justification and holiness.

An instinctive fidelity to the apostolic order, despite the separation

What makes the case of Charles Wesley singular, however, and worthy of an honest apologetic record, is precisely his resistance to the irregular ordinations of 1784: Charles saw in it a theologically decisive point, to the extent of opposing, on this one subject, his own brother and co-founder of the movement — an ecclesiological disagreement which the article distinguishes from fraternal relations, without making of it a personal break. This instinct — the conviction that an authentic ministry cannot be born of a mere private decision, but presupposes an ordered and received transmission — meets, without ever fully leading Charles Wesley himself there, the central intuition which the Catholic Church holds as a point of faith: that the episcopate, handed down unbroken from the Apostles, constitutes the full degree of the sacrament of Holy Orders, without which no Church can validly ordain itself^[100]. Recognizing this sound intuition in an eighteenth-century Protestant hymn writer in no way effaces the real ecclesial separation that remains between his work and full Catholic communion; it only invites us never to reduce Charles Wesley to a mere antithesis of the Catholic faith, but to discern, in his song as in his obstinate fidelity to the received order, seeds of truth which the Spirit knows how to bring to fruit even beyond the visible frontiers of the Church.

• John Wesley (1703-1791) — the elder brother, founder and organizer of Methodism, whose article details the Georgia mission, the Aldersgate experience, the break with Whitefield and the ordinations of 1784.
• Jacob Arminius (1560-1609) — the Dutch theologian whose doctrine of resistible grace inspires the Wesleyan Arminianism set to song in And Can It Be.
• John Calvin (1509-1564) — the reformer whose doctrine of predestination underlies the Calvinism opposed by the Wesleys to George Whitefield.
• Martin Luther (1483-1546) — whose commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, read by Charles Wesley at John Bray's in May 1738, accompanied his conversion.
• George Fox (1624-1691) — another great figure of English religious dissent, an earlier contemporary of the Quaker movement.
• John Knox (c. 1514-1572) — Scottish reformer and founder of Calvinist Presbyterianism.
• Sola Scriptura — the Protestant principle of the exclusive authority of Scripture.
• Answers to Protestantism — a Catholic synthesis of the great objections born of the Reformation.
• The Council of Trent (1545-1563) — the Catholic doctrinal definitions on the Eucharist and the sacrament of Holy Orders invoked in this article.