Hymn of the Week: February 28, 2025
Christ, Whose Glory Fills the Skies
Glory to God: 662
TEXT: Charles Wesley, 1740
MUSIC: German folk melody; adapt. Johann Werner
Christ, whose glory fills the skies;
Christ, the true, the only light;
Sun of Righteousness, arise;
Triumph o'er the shades of night;
Dayspring from on high, be near;
Daystar, in my heart appear.
Dark and cheerless is the morn
Unaccompanied by thee;
Joyless is the day's return
Till thy mercy's beams I see;
Till they inward light impart,
Cheer my eyes and warm my heart.
Visit then this soul of mine;
Pierce the gloom of sin and grief;
Fill me, radiancy divine;
Scatter all my unbelief;
More and more thyself display,
Shining to the perfect day.
The following comes from the informative website: www.hymnary.org The story opf Charles Wesley and his brother cannot be told enough.
Charles Wesley, M.A.,
…was the great hymn-writer of the Wesley family, perhaps, taking quantity and quality into consideration, the great hymn-writer of all ages. Charles Wesley was the youngest son and 18th child of Samuel and Susanna Wesley and was born at Epworth Rectory, Dec. 18, 1707. In 1716 he went to Westminster School, being provided with a home and board by his elder brother Samuel, then usher at the school, until 1721, when he was elected King's Scholar, and as such received his board and education free. In 1726 Charles Wesley was elected to a Westminster studentship at Christ Church, Oxford, where he took his degree in 1729 and became a college tutor. In the early part of the same year, his religious impressions were much deeper, and he became one of the first bands of "Oxford Methodists."
This hymn, like so many of Wesley’s hymns, contains several Scripture allusions. The idea of the glory of the Lord filling the skies, especially at morning, can be seen in passages such as Exodus 16:7 (“In the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord”) or 2 Samuel 23:4 (“He dawns on them like the morning light”). Jesus said, “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12, 9:5), and John called him “The true light, which gives light to everyone” (John 1:9). Wesley used the name “Sun of Righteousness,” which is from Malachi 4:2. He used this name frequently in his hymns, including “Hark! the herald angels sing,” “Come, O thou traveler unknown,” the original 18-stanza form of “O for a thousand tongues to sing,” and “Sun of unclouded righteousness.” The name “dayspring from on high” is from Luke 1:78, especially in the King James Version (1611) and the Book of Common Prayer (1662). Similarly, “Day-star in my heart appear” is almost a direct quote from 2 Peter 1:19.
After the rich infusion of Scripture, Wesley shifted his approach. As Carl Daw has noted, “Wesley does not continue with this intense level of scriptural allusion but moves ahead with a logician’s or rhetorician’s tendency to emphasize the desirable by considering its opposite.”[1] The second stanza speaks of how the return of natural daylight in the morning is still dark, cheerless, and joyless if it is without the mercy of Christ. The third stanza is a prayer, asking for Christ to pierce the heart and be displayed in the life of the worshiper.
Reformed scholar Bert Polman believed this morning hymn was “unusual in that it does not contain the customary reference to the previous night’s rest or to the work and dangers of the day ahead.”[2]
James Montgomery is often quoted for his endorsement of the hymn, calling it one of Wesley’s “loveliest progeny.” In the preface to his Christian Psalmist (1825), in the process of summarizing the hymns of Toplady, he mentioned a situation in which “Christ whose glory fills the skies” had often been misattributed to Toplady:
Had this poem appeared without name, it might have been confidently set down as the production of Charles Wesley—as one of Charles Wesley’s loveliest progeny has been fathered upon Augustus Toplady.[3]
Timothy Dudley-Smith agreed with Montgomery’s idea:
Had this poem appeared without name, it might have been confidently set down as the production of Charles Wesley—as one of Charles Wesley’s loveliest progeny has been fathered upon Augustus Toplady.[3]
Timothy Dudley-Smith agreed with Montgomery’s idea:
Montgomery’s praise was entirely justified. These verses are indeed some of the loveliest written by Charles Wesley, with a poetic imagery that is beautifully handled within the metre. They are based on the Benedictus (Luke 1: 68-79), with which he would have been daily familiar from the Order for Morning Prayer in the Prayer Book.[4]
J.R. Watson has praised it also, saying, “from the brilliant assurance of the first line to the triumphant final image, it has a poetic sweep and imaginative command that are rare even for Charles Wesley.”[5] He explained further elsewhere:
The three verses are economical, absolutely functional in that there are no distractions from the theme, and wonderfully accommodated to the rhythm and metre. It could be said of the first line that, as Christ’s glory fills the skies, so the words exactly fill the line, beginning a hymn which is rare in its taut control and imaginative power.[6]
Erik Routley put the nature of this morning hymn in the context of two others from the broader repertoire:
“Sun of righteousness” caught the imagination of Charles Wesley, and here we find it; along with that other picturesque and old-fashioned word, “Dayspring.” Now this gives “Christ, whose glory” a universality which places it apart from all other morning hymns. Compare it with Bishop Ken’s [“Awake, my soul, and with the sun”], which we noticed above, or with Keble’s [“New every morning is the love”]. The Bishop gives us solid, down-to-earth, honest puritan counsel; the country parson gives gentle advice about the sanctification of daily routine. But Wesley talks all the time about the glory of Christ. “Christ, whose glory fills the skies”—the late Bernard Manning called the phrase “Dantesque,” and that is not undue praise. It is as bold a conception as you will find anywhere in all the hymn-books. …
For whereas Ken’s excellent lines tell us to do our duty and Keble’s tell us that God can make the dullest work profitable to his glory, what Wesley is here saying amounts to no less than a prayer that, through the present day, my life may be conformable to the mystery of the Gospel. … To pray, “Sun of righteousness, arise,… Daystar, in my heart appear,” is to pray that the miracle of the incarnation may be re-enacted in my own person; that will and affections may be the very habitation of Christ even as Bethlehem’s stable was his habitation. We sing “Visit then this soul of mine,” and we mean just what we meant when we sang “Visit us with thy salvation” in “Love divine [all loves excelling].” We mean (as is explained at that place) not merely “come,” but “come and convert and conquer.”[7]
The great irony of the hymn is in the way it is so masterfully treated by scholars, in spite of its near-dismissal by the Wesleys in favor of the 1762 version, which turned out to be the one set aside by generations to follow.
