The Cyber Hymnal

In preparation for this Sunday's sermon on the Beatitudes (see previous post), I was reading D. A. Carson's commentary on Matthew. In it, he quotes this verse from the well-known hymn by Charles Wesley (right) titled "O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing":

He speaks, and listening to his voice
New life the dead receive,
The mournful, broken hearts rejoice,
The humble poor believe.

It was a verse that I grew up singing as part of that hymn, but in reading it again I realized that I hadn't heard it in a while. Sure enough, our current hymnal includes five stanzas, but not that particular verse.

This is not all that unusual for modern hymnals. Lots of hymns from centuries past had many more than five verses. But, of course, I was now intrigued to see if there were other verses to this hymn that I knew, or perhaps many others that I wasn't even aware of.

Did I Google it? No, I just went over to The Cyber Hymnal. They have thousands of hymns (over 7,300) that you can search or browse by title, author, composer, tune, etc. And, you can here sound files of the hymn tunes as well. [It's kind of rinky-dink synthesized music, but it gets you the melody.]

If you go to "O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing", you'll find 19 verses and learn that this isn't even the whole original poem! Here's the background given by The Cyber Hymnal:

Wesley wrote this hymn to com­mem­o­rate the first an­ni­ver­sa­ry of his con­ver­sion to Christ. This or­i­gin is re­flect­ed in the lyr­ics, “On this glad day the glor­i­ous Sun of Right­eous­ness arose.” The stanza that be­gins “O for a thou­sand tongues to sing” is verse seven of Wes­ley’s orig­in­al po­em. This work first ap­peared in Hymns and Sac­red Po­ems in 1740.

Go here to learn more about Charles Wesley and browse through many of his hymns. You probably recognize several of them.