O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing

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O For A Thousand Tongues To Sing is a Christian hymn written by Charles Wesley. Charles Wesley wrote over 6,000 hymns, many of which were subsequently reprinted, frequently with alterations, in hymnals, particularly those of the Methodist Church.

Charles Wesley was suffering a bout of pleurisy in May, 1738, while he and his brother were studying under the Moravian scholar Peter Böhler in London. At the time, Charles was plagued by extreme doubts about his faith. Taken to bed with the sickness on May 21st, Charles was attended by a group of Christians who offered him testimony and basic care, and he was deeply affected by this. He read from his Bible and found himself deeply affected by the words, and at peace with God. Shortly his strength began to return. He wrote of this experience in his journal and counted it as a renewal of his faith; when his brother John had a similar experience on the 24th, the two men met and sang a hymn Charles had written in praise of his renewal.

One year from the experience, Charles was taken with the urge to write another hymn, this one in commemoration of his renewal of faith. This hymn took the form of a 18-stanza poem, beginning with the opening lines 'Glory to God, and praise, and love,/Be ever, ever given and was published in 1740 and entitled 'For the anniversary day of one's conversion'. The seventh verse, which begins, 'O For A Thousand Tongues To Sing', and which now is invariably the first verse of a shorter hymn recalls the words of Peter Bohler who said, 'Had I a thousand tongues I would praise Him with them all.' The hymn was placed first in John Wesley's A Collection of Hymns for the People Called Methodists published in 1780. It appeared first in every (Wesleyan) Methodist hymnal from that time until the publication of Hymns and Psalms in 1983 (Watson and Tickett: Companion to Hymns and Psalms, 1988).

Today the hymn is often condensed into 6-8 stanzas. In Great Britain, editors of various of hymnals have muddled the logical order of the first three verses (O for a thousand tongues to sing; My gracious Master and my God; Jesus, the name that charms our fears) and broken the continuity of thought between them. In some places, including the USA, the hymn is commonly sung to Lowell Mason’s 1839 arrangement of the tune Azmon, written by Carl G. Glaser in 1828. Mason's arrangement was written as a setting for this hymn. In Great Britain the tune Lydia by Thomas Phillips or Richmond by Thomas Haweis are commonly used, though in larger congregations Thomas Jarman's stirring tune 'Lyngham' is favoured.