"Love Divine, All Loves Excelling" is Charles Wesley's most theologically complete hymn and one of the most sung in Anglican and Methodist worship worldwide. In four stanzas it traces the arc of divine love from the Incarnation through the present life of sanctification to the final perfection of the redeemed soul - a complete soteriology in verse.
The Composition
Wesley wrote the hymn in 1747, taking as his starting point - and deliberately transforming - the opening of John Dryden's song 'Fairest Isle, All Isles Excelling' from the 1691 opera King Arthur. The secular love song's fervent address to 'Venus here will choose her dwelling' becomes 'Love divine, all loves excelling / Joy of heaven, to earth come down' - the identical metrical pattern and rhyme scheme redirected from Aphrodite to the God who 'fix[es] in us thy humble dwelling.' Wesley's method was characteristic: he did not compose in a vacuum but read the culture, identified its emotional registers, and redirected them toward their divine object.
The hymn was published in Hymns and Sacred Poems (1747). It exists in several textual variants, as Wesley revised his texts through multiple editions, and hymnals have treated the stanzas differently. The most common contemporary versions omit the third stanza (which contains the controversial 'pure and spotless let us be' language that some found to claim too much for human sinlessness in this life).
Biblical Text
John 3:16 - 'For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life' - provides the hymn's theological foundation: the love that 'excels all loves' is the divine agape expressed in the gift of the Son. 1 John 4:8 - 'He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love' - gives the hymn its opening address: 'Love divine' is not an attribute of God but a name - the one addressed is God himself, who is love by nature, not by decision.
Revelation 21:5 - 'And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new' - drives the final stanza, which envisions the completed work of sanctification: '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.' The phrase 'changed from glory into glory' quotes 2 Corinthians 3:18 (KJV): 'But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.' The hymn thus moves from the divine love that descends (stanza one) to the human life that is transformed (stanzas two and three) to the final glorification in which the believer is entirely transformed into the image of the divine love (stanza four).
Wesleyan Sanctification
The theological argument of the hymn is a defense of the Wesleyan doctrine of entire sanctification - the conviction that it is possible for the Holy Spirit to purify the heart from all sin in this life, producing what Wesley called 'perfect love.' The hymn does not claim that the believer has achieved this; it petitions God to achieve it: 'Take away our bent to sinning, / Alpha and Omega be, / End of faith as its beginning.' The prayer is for the complete transformation of the human will and affections, so that the believer loves God as God loves - 'lost in wonder, love, and praise.'
This doctrine was controversial in Wesley's day and remains so. Critics argued that it set too high a standard and produced either spiritual pride (in those who claimed to have achieved it) or despair (in those who found they had not). Wesley's response, reflected in the hymn, was that perfection in love was not the absence of temptation but the absence of deliberate sin - and that the proper response to the doctrine was not claim but petition.
Musical Settings
The hymn has been set to two principal tunes: 'Blaenwern,' composed by William Penfro Rowlands (1905), which is the standard setting in England and Wales; and 'Hyfrydol,' composed by Rowland Hugh Prichard (1830), which is the standard setting in North America. Both tunes are in the same broad, expansive style - wide melodic range, sustained phrases, rich harmonic language - that matches the hymn's aspiration toward transcendence. 'Blaenwern' is perhaps the more architecturally perfect of the two; 'Hyfrydol' is more immediately singable.
Performance and Reception
The hymn is a standard of Anglican cathedral and parish worship worldwide, regularly performed at weddings, ordinations, and major festivals. It has been used at multiple British royal weddings, where its vision of divine love transforming human love has made it the preferred expression of Christian marriage theology. Its breadth of reception - sung by Methodists, Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and many other traditions - testifies to the universality of its theological vision: the prayer to be 'lost in wonder, love, and praise' expresses an aspiration that transcends denominational boundaries.