Love divine, all loves excelling,
Joy of heaven, to earth come down;
Fix in us Thy humble dwelling,
All Thy faithful mercies crown.
Jesu, Thou art all compassion,
Pure, unbounded love Thou art;
Visit us with Thy salvation,
Enter every trembling heart.
Come, Almighty to deliver,
Let us all Thy life receive;
Suddenly return, and never,
Nevermore Thy temples leave.
Thee we would be always blessing,
Serve Thee as Thy hosts above,
Pray, and praise Thee, without ceasing,
Glory in Thy perfect love.
Finish, then, Thy new creation,
Pure and spotless let us be;
Let us see Thy great salvation
Perfectly restored in Thee;
Changed from glory into glory,
Till in heaven we take our place,
Till we cast our crowns before Thee,
Lost in wonder, love, and praise.
Public domain hymn text (1747). Words by Charles Wesley.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Charles Wesley wrote this hymn's text in 1747, and it has since come to be widely regarded, including by many literary critics working entirely outside any specifically Christian religious tradition, as among the finest individual hymns ever composed in the English language, prized in particular for the sustained technical control and cumulative emotional intensity of its poetic language across its several stanzas.
Wesley deliberately modeled the hymn's specific meter and a number of its individual phrases on 'Fairest Isle,' a secular love song originally composed for Henry Purcell's 1691 opera 'King Arthur,' with a libretto written by the celebrated poet John Dryden, in which the original song is sung in praise of Venus, the Roman goddess of romantic love. Wesley's deliberate practice of reworking existing secular romantic songs into new hymns of specifically divine love was a technique he returned to on several documented occasions throughout his hymn-writing career, treating popular secular melodies and poetic structures as raw material that could be redirected toward explicitly Christian devotional purposes.
The hymn's own structure moves through a sustained meditation on several distinct aspects of Christian sanctification — the presence of God's love now, freedom from ongoing sin, and the believer's eventual full restoration into God's own likeness — reflecting the specifically Wesleyan Methodist theological emphasis on the possibility of genuine, progressive growth in personal holiness during earthly life, not merely a single completed act of forgiveness at conversion.
The hymn has since become one of the most frequently chosen hymns for British royal weddings, sung at the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer and again at the 2011 wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton, giving a hymn originally reworked from a seventeenth-century opera song about the goddess of romantic love an enduring later association with some of the most publicly watched weddings in modern British history.
