Charles Wesley’s ‘Lo! He Comes With Clouds Descending’

Two of Charles Wesley’s most enduring hymns are associated with advent: ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’ and ‘Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending’. The first concerns the birth of Christ; the second, his return. The Reverend James King, in Anglican Hymnology (1885), a survey of hymnals used in the Church of England at home and abroad, positioned them in second and third respectively in his list of ‘first rank hymns’, where they joined ‘All Praise to Thee, My God, This Night’ and ‘Rock of Ages’ as the ‘Four Great Anglican Hymns’ of the nineteenth century. Wesley’s hymns are well documented in the Library’s collections and throughout the archival and printed collections of the Methodist Archives and Research Centre (MARC) at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library. 

‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’ is perhaps the most famous of the two hymns. A version of it was first published as a ‘Hymn for Christmass-Day’ in Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739), one of the earliest hymn books to be produced by Charles and his brother John Wesley. This version, however, is considerably different from the one we know today. ‘Hark, how all the Welkin rings’, as it was in 1739, was adapted by the influential evangelical George Whitefield for his Hymns for Social Worship (1753). My colleague Charlotte has previously written about this hymn and a manuscript version, in Charles Wesley’s hand, found among the archives of the MARC.  

‘Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending’ also has an interesting textual and publication history. Like ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’, it was not included in John Wesley’s A collection of Hymns, for the use of the People called Methodists (1780), which brought together in a single volume, ‘neither to be cumbersome, nor expensive’, many of the hymns that had been published in separate volumes over several decades. The collection would exert a significant influence on Methodist hymnody throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It went through various changes following John Wesley’s death in 1791, and several ‘Supplementary Hymns’, ‘Lo! He Comes Descending with Clouds’ among them, were added in the early nineteenth century. The hymn appears, with its original spelling, elisions and punctuation simplified, in Singing the Faith (2011), the authorised hymn book of the Methodist Church of Great Britain, and features regularly in the Church’s advent services.

The hymn is often sung to the tune ‘Helmsley’, known originally as ‘Olivers’ after the Methodist preacher and hymn writer Thomas Olivers (1725-1799), to whom it is usually credited. Accounts of the tune’s origins vary, as is seen in an entry for ‘Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending’ in the second volume of George Grove’s A Dictionary of Music (1880), which tries to unpick the many stories which had by the late nineteenth century become attached to the tune. It has long been suggested, for example, that Olivers based it on a country dance, possibly by the English composer Thomas Arne (1710-1778), he heard whistled in the street.  

There are many recordings of the hymn, mostly by choirs, but it also featured on an album of eighteenth-century songs titled Sing Lustily and with Good Courage (1990) by Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band. The title is taken from John Wesley’s directions for singers published in the 1770 edition of Select Hymns with Tunes Annext: ‘Sing lustily and with good Courage. Beware of singing as if you were half Dead, or half a Sleep; but lift up your Voice with Strength. Be no more afraid of your Voice now, nor more ashamed of its being heard, than when you sang the songs of Satan.’ 

‘Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending’ was first published in John and Charles Wesley’s Hymns of Intercession for all Mankind (1758), one of many hymn books produced in the eighteenth century by the Wesley brothers, as compilers, editors, translators and authors. The title page includes a passage from Timothy 2:1: ‘I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men’. References to intercessory prayer – the practice of praying for others – appear in Charles Wesley’s journals in the early years of the evangelical revival. On 13 June 1740, Charles wrote of a meeting in Wapping: ‘At y^e Time of Intercession, we were carried out for all mankind, especially for our own Church & Nation, & y^e little Flock w[hi]ch GOD is gathering’ (DDCW 10/2).  

‘Church and Nation’ are present throughout Hymns of Intercession. The volume contains forty hymns that address a variety of contemporary concerns. There are hymns for monarchs (George II, Frederick the Great), institutions (courts, parliament, the army and navy, universities), childbirth, young children, prisoners and captives, widows, ‘our Enemies, Persecutors and Slanderers’, and ‘our unconverted Relations’. Theological debates of the time are reflected in a hymn for ‘Arians, Socianians, Deists, Pelagians, etc.’

‘Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending’ is found towards the end of the volume among a group of five hymns for ‘Thy Kingdom come!’:  

The hymn is full of references to the New Testament, such as Revelation 1:7: ‘Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him’. It was inspired by an earlier hymn that begins ‘Lo! He cometh, countless Trumpets’, by the preacher and Moravian minister John Cennick (1718-1755), an associate of John and Charles Wesley in Bristol who was expelled from the local Methodist society for what he described in The Life of Mr J. Cennick (1745: second edition) as a ‘difference in doctrines’ between himself and John Wesley. Cennick’s hymn was published in the fifth edition of his Collection of Sacred Hymns (1752).  

Martin Madan (1725-1790), Anglican clergyman and chaplain of the Lock Hospital near Hyde Park Corner, an institution for penitent female patients, produced a third version in A collection of psalms and hymns, extracted from various authors. And published by The Reverend Mr. Madan (1760), which combined different parts of the earlier texts, a practice echoed in more modern treatments, such as those found in Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The English Hymnal (1906) and The New Oxford Book of Carols (1992). ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’, in its amended form, was also included (a digitized version is available via Luna, one of the Library’s digital platforms). Madan was a friend and correspondent of Charles Wesley’s, and music appears to have been a shared interest. In April 1766, Madan saved tickets for Wesley and ‘any other friends you choose to bring’ for a performance that same year at the Lock Hospital of Manasseh, an oratorio by the organist John Worgan (1724-1794).  

In 2022, the Library purchased a pocket volume containing several hymns written in shorthand by Charles Wesley. A digitised version of this volume is available via Luna. This volume includes what may be the only surviving draft by Charles Wesley of ‘Lo! He Comes Descending with Clouds’.  

Charles Wesley, like his brother John, adopted a form of shorthand devised by the Manchester-born poet John Byrom (1692-1763), himself the author of a once popular Christmas hymn, ‘Christians awake’ (the original manuscript, entitled ‘Christmas Day’, can be found in the John Byrom Collection, held by our friends at Chetham’s Library). Byrom began to develop and teach his system from the early 1720s and it would eventually find its way into print as The Universal English short-hand (1767).

The shorthand in Charles Wesley’s letters, sermons and journals, as well as his hymns and poems, has long posed challenges for historians. Kenneth Newport and Gareth Lloyd, in their edition of Wesley’s letters, write that he ‘so adapted the shorthand system to suit his own needs that it became almost a different script’ and that ‘deciphering Charles’s shorthand texts is emphatically not an exact science’. Shorthand was economical – saving both time and paper – and it helped preserve confidentiality. Timothy Underhill, in an article exploring Charles Wesley’s use of Byrom’s shorthand, also suggests that Wesley may have seen a place for it in the work of evangelicals, that it ‘might facilitate communication across countries and cultures’.

Although the manuscript is undated, it contains evidence suggesting it was compiled during the 1750s and 1760s. A list of ‘Dr. Birom’s Subscribers’, located towards the end of the volume, includes ‘Mrs CW’, Sarah (Sally) Gwynne, whom Charles married in 1749.

Two manuscript poems –  ‘On the Death of Mrs Ann Wigginton, 24 April 1757’ and ‘On the Death of Mrs Mary Naylor, 21 March 1757’ – were published in Funeral Hymns (1759). The volume is thought to have remained in the possession of Charles Wesley until he gave it to the Reverend Edward Spencer (1739-1819) in around 1770.

See our website for further information on the Methodist Archives and Research Centre (MARC), as well as the Library’s other Methodist and Nonconformist collections : 

• https://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/rylands/special-collections/a-to-z/
• https://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/rylands/special-collections/subject-areas/methodist-archives-and-research-collections/