Rejoice, the Lord is King  

Charles Wesley wrote these words in 1744 as an Easter hymn; he published them in 1746 in Hymns for our Lord’s Resurrection, a small booklet in a series of pocket-sized volumes on the seasons of the Christian year that he issued during the mid-1740s.  Nativity Hymns appeared in 1745, Ascension Hymns in May,1746, shortly after the Resurrection volume.  Hymns of Petition and Thanksgiving for the Promise of the Father came just before Pentecost in May,1746.  This last one quickly became known as Whitsunday Hymns.  The Resurrection volume contains sixteen hymns, though the last (“All hail the true Elijah”) is headed, “For Ascension-day.”   As these volumes demonstrate, Charles, never distancing himself from the Church of England, was a faithful observer of the Christian year.  

 

The opening line of the hymn echoes the opening of Psalm 97:1 and 12, and the refrain echoes Philippians 4:4; the refrain begins, however, not with biblical allusion, but with a line from the liturgy—the Sursum corda.  The middle stanzas, 2-5, focus on the risen Christ and his triumph over evil, and the hymn concludes with the second coming. The final stanza looks to the general resurrection, and the refrain now echoes, not the passage in the letter to the Philippians, but a passage from the letter to the Thessalonians (4:16): “We soon shall hear the Archangel’s voice,/ The trump of God shall sound, rejoice.”  Modern hymnals often omit the fifth of Wesley’s six stanzas.  Hymnals in the British tradition also omit the last stanza.  Those hymnals use a tune, “Gopsal,” by Handel, which was discovered in 1826 by Samuel Wesley III, Charles’ son.

 

John Darwall (1731-1789), who composed the tune we sing, was educated at Manchester Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford.  Ordained to the priesthood in 1757, he served as Curate in several churches until in 1769 he became Vicar of St Matthew’s church, Walsall, Staffordshire.  Probably during his curacy, he composed a melody and bass line for each of the psalms in the collection of Tate and Brady (New Version of the Psalms of David, 1696).  He composed this tune for Richard Baxter’s “Ye holy angels bright.”  Darwall’s tune is striking for its dramatic opening phrase with its leaps of a third, a fifth and a sixth, and the variation in the third line, as well as for the descending scale less one note in the first line, which is answered by the ascending scale plus one note in the final line.

 

The tune was first called “Darwall’s” in Aaron Williams’ Psalmody in Miniature (1769) and used again the following year in his New Universal Psalmodist as the setting for Psalm 148, in both cases with a slight alteration from Darwell’s manuscript in the opening measure.  Psalm 148 was in an odd metrical form.   Most of the 136 psalms in the collection were in Common Metre (8686), Long Metre (8888), or Short Metre (6686), or one of those doubled, as they had been sung in the English Church since the 16th century.  But Psalm 148 was in a metre first used for the psalm in the Geneva Psalter: 6666.44.44.  It was perhaps created by an English Genevan named John Pullain (ca.1517-1565) and was certainly first used for a psalm paraphrase by him.  Pullain, deprived of his living at the accession of Mary I, joined the exiles in Geneva  and had a hand in the Geneva Bible translation; he was the author of paraphrases of psalms 148 (“Give laud unto the Lord”) and 149, which were added to the second edition of the Anglo-Genevan Psalter in 1558.  After the accession of Elizabeth I, Pullain returned to England; he later became Archdeacon of Colchester and then a Prebendary of St Paul’s.