While Jacob for a wife doth wait, A length of servile years (His love to Rachel is so great) As a few days appears: And shall I think it long to stay Or wish my labours passed? A thousand years are but a day If Christ be mine at last. These verses on Num. xi. 27, 28 are in a different strain. Eldad, they said, and Medad there, Irregularly bold, By Moses uncommissioned dare A separate meeting hold! And still whom none, but Heaven, will own, Men whom the world decry, Men authorized by God alone Presume to prophesy! How often have I blindly done What zealous Joshua did, Impatient to the rulers run And cried, ‘My lords, forbid!’ Silence the schismatics; constrain Their _thoughts_ with ours to agree; And sacrifice the souls of men To idol unity! John Wesley lets this pass without note or comment, but when, on Num. xvi. 10, Charles wrote Raised from the people’s lowest lees, Guard, Lord, Thy preaching witnesses, Nor let their pride the honour claim Of sealing covenants in Thy name. he notes on the first line, ‘Query? J. W.’ Here our detailed consideration of Charles Wesley’s hymns must end, though there are many others over which one would be glad to linger. Some of the hymns on Death and the Future Life are of great power, though some have lost and others are losing their hold upon Methodist worshippers. Charles Wesley’s view of death is well illustrated in these verses, which I quote the more readily because, to my regret, they are not found in the _Methodist Hymn-book_. If they could not often be sung in the congregation, there are times when they would speak the inmost feeling of the devout disciple. O when shall we sweetly remove, O when shall we enter our rest, Return to the Sion above, The mother of spirits distressed! Not all the archangels can tell The joys of that holiest place, When Jesus is pleased to reveal The light of His heavenly face. ’Tis good at Thy word to be here, ’Tis better in Thee to be gone, And see Thee in glory appear, And rise to a share of Thy throne. To mourn for Thy coming is sweet, To weep at Thy longer delay; But Thou, whom we hasten to meet, Shalt chase all our sorrows away. This is not the tone of modern worship. It is open to the charge of that ‘other-worldliness’ of which our time is so impatient and knows so little, but it is the language of the disciples whom Jesus loves. ‘Having the desire to depart and be with Christ: for it is very far better.’ ‘He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus!’ After Charles Wesley, Methodism had no great hymn-writer, though Thomas Olivers (1725-99), one of the early preachers, wrote one of the finest of our hymns of adoration.