O for a thousand tongues to sing
My great Redeemer's praise,
The glories of my God and King,
The triumphs of His grace!
My gracious Master and my God,
Assist me to proclaim,
To spread through all the earth abroad,
The honors of Thy name.
Jesus! the name that charms our fears,
That bids our sorrows cease;
'Tis music in the sinner's ears,
'Tis life, and health, and peace.
Public domain hymn text (published 1739). Words by Charles Wesley.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Charles Wesley, younger brother of Methodist movement founder John Wesley, became one of the most prolific hymn writers in the entire history of Christianity, credited over his lifetime with more than six thousand individual hymn texts — an output so vast that a significant portion remains in print and in active congregational use nearly three centuries after his death, while much of it has never been set to music or sung at all.
He wrote this particular hymn to mark the first anniversary of his own dramatic conversion experience, which had occurred on May 21, 1738, at a small religious meeting in London where Charles described feeling a sudden, overwhelming assurance of God's forgiveness after a long period of spiritual searching and personal doubt — an experience that closely paralleled his brother John's own famous 'heart strangely warmed' conversion just three days later at a separate meeting on Aldersgate Street, an event now considered one of the founding moments of the entire Methodist movement.
The hymn's famous opening line, wishing for 'a thousand tongues' to sing God's praise, was directly inspired by a conversation Charles had shortly after his conversion with Peter Bohler, a German Moravian church leader whose calm, settled confidence in his own faith had deeply influenced both Wesley brothers during a formative period when they were still working through unresolved spiritual uncertainty of their own. Bohler reportedly told Charles that if he personally possessed a thousand tongues, he would use every single one of them to praise Christ — an offhand remark Wesley later transformed into the hymn's now-famous opening plea for exactly that same multiplied capacity to give praise.
Originally composed as an eighteen-stanza hymn, of which only a small handful of verses are typically sung in modern hymnals, the full text was placed deliberately first in Wesley's own published hymn collections for decades afterward, functioning almost as a personal manifesto or founding statement for the enormous life's work of hymn writing and itinerant evangelism that followed his conversion — meaning the very first hymn a reader encountered upon opening a Wesleyan hymnbook was, quite intentionally, the story of how its author's entire hymn-writing career had begun in the first place.
