Illuminations
To Hear the Bridegroom's Voice
by Anthony Esolen
In September of 1770, George Whitefield, the Methodist preacher, was dying of congestive heart failure, but he prayed to God that he could preach one final sermon to the people of New England. That prayer was granted, which for Whitefield must have been quite a grace, given his passionate and animated style, and his utter conviction about the love of God. There was never anything Laodicean about that man. He suffered an attack of asthma the next day and died, a servant of God to the end.
He and the brothers Wesley had traveled the length and breadth of the colonies in the 1730s, prompting what was called the Great Awakening. During that time, Whitefield had made a fast friend of that semi-virtuous self-promoter, Ben Franklin, who never passed up the main chance when he saw it. Franklin published Whitefield's sermons, and Whitefield and the Wesleys gave to the colonies a renewed trust in the special providence of God. It would be interesting to determine how many copies of Methodist sermons were to be found in the libraries of the Founders, by comparison with copies of the social-contract dreamers Locke and Hobbes.
Boundless Love
For the love of God is not parceled out by contract, and the providence of God is not bound to imaginary laws of historical progress. If it were not so, then we could prescribe bounds to his love: as if we were gods above God, saying, "Thus far shall Thy proud grace be stayed, thus far and no farther!" It is with nations, we should hope, as with persons, that we may turn away from our evil and say, with Milton's penitent Adam,
Undoubtedly He will relent, and turn
From His displeasure; in whose look serene,
When angry most He seemed and most severe,
What else but favor, grace, and mercy shone?
The narrow limits are rather ours. We are slow of ear and faint of heart. We know that love calls unto love, fearful cataracts of love, so we shy away from it. Sometimes we must pray for the strength to bear the punishments of the Lord. As often should we pray for the strength to bear his favor.
That is the message of Charles Wesley's fine hymn, O Love Divine. The first stanza applies Psalm 84 to the love of Christ:
O Love divine, how sweet Thou art!
When shall I find my longing heart
All taken up by Thee?
I thirst, I faint, I die to prove
The greatness of redeeming love,
The love of Christ to me.
"How lovely is your dwelling place, Lord Almighty!" cries the Psalmist. "My soul yearns, even faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God." That dwelling place is not to be found in Palestine, but in the being of God himself. The poet is in an agony of desire to "prove," that is to feel, to know by the fullness of experience itself, the love of Christ.
Rapt in Contemplation
In the second stanza, Wesley turns to the mighty claim made by St. Paul, reminding the church in Rome that they are more than conquerors: "For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (8:38–39). No creature can separate us from that love, because no creature can even fathom it:
Stronger His love than death or hell;
Its riches are unsearchable;
The first-born sons of light
Desire in vain its depths to see;
They cannot reach the mystery,
The length, the breadth, the height.
The Lord works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform. If his providential ways are infinitely above our ways, so is his unsearchable love:
God only knows the love of God,
And yet He deigns to shed abroad
His love in my poor heart!
For love I sigh, for Christ I pine;
This only portion, Lord, be mine,
Be mine the better part.
Wesley places himself beside Mary of Bethany, rapt in contemplation of the beauty of Christ, and the sweetness of his words. It is more than listening to the words of a wise man, infinitely more. It is a listening in love, intensely personal, beyond measuring and weighing; a listening that is akin to beholding in
wonder:
O that I could forever sit
With Mary at the Master's feet!
Be this my happy choice:
My only care, delight, and bliss,
My joy, my heaven on earth, be this,
To hear the Bridegroom's voice.
A Hymn to Remember
It is pleasant to suppose that the most secular of the Founders, Franklin himself, heard that hymn sung by a rousing congregation of a thousand men and women, or that Jefferson might have sung it himself as a youth in Virginia, and remembered something of it many years later. Would that we might remember it, too.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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more from the online archives
32.1—January/February 2019
Sex, Women's Ordination & the Rejection of Hierarchy & Equality by James A. Altena
30.2—March/April 2017
on Reading Don Quixote in Its Original Christian Context by Luis Cortest
32.6—November/December 2019
Historical Truth, Beguiling Stories & Three Kinds of Hearers by Anthony Esolen
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