Earth explains the plaintive cry

Verse 1
Earth explains thy plaintive cry,
While to its centre shook,
Nature’s works inform us why
Thou wast of God forsook:
Now the wondrous cause we trace,
Thy love in its effects we find,
Joyfully thy death confess
The life of all mankind.

Verse 2
By thy death the living way
Is open’d to the skies,
Judgments horribly display
The death that never dies!
Earth with conscious dread is fill’d!
But lo, the riven rocks proclaim
Penitential grace reveal’d
Thro’ thy almighty name.

Verse 3
Lo, the open’d graves declare
Thy death destroys our sin,
Doth on twice-dead souls confer
The life of God within:
Lo, the saints by rising show
That all may feel thy quickening power,
May thy resurrection know,
And wake to sleep no more.

Verse 4
Rising saints forsake the tomb,
To us they testify
We our bodies shall resume,
And mount above the sky;
We shall leave the sepulchre,
In that Jerusalem above
Glad before thy face t’ appear,
And sing thy dying love.

Hymnal/Album: Originally titled: “‘The graves were opened, and many bodies of saints which slept arose, and came out of their graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.’—[Matt. 27,] v. 52, 53.” This hymn appears in the 1766 manuscript “MS Matthew.” This manuscript is part of the collection of the Methodist Archive and Research Centre in The John Rylands Library, The University of Manchester (accession number MA 1977/577, Charles Wesley Notebooks Box 3). Accessed through the website of The Center for Studies in the Wesleyan Tradition, Duke Divinity School. Published in The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley, Collected and Arranged by G. Osborn, Vol. 10 (London: Wesleyan-Methodist Conference Office, 1870), page 432.
Publishing: Public Domain