May She Have a Word with You?

Perhaps Charles Wesley's two volumes of Funeral Hymns (1746 and 1759), plus a few poems left in manuscript form, are the least known of his poetical corpus. They are a treasury, however, of his views on the importance of women in eighteenth-century England as examples of how to live the Christian life. Entries in his MS Journal indicate an extremely positive relationship with women who are his coequals in mission and in the Methodist societies, and much of the work depended on them. Furthermore,