Happy the age and place

Verse 1
Happy the age and place
Where God’s peculiar love
Vouchsafes his witnesses to raise,
And openly approve;
Where full of faith divine
As in the gap they stand,
With fervent zeal and wisdom shine,
And guard a sinful land.

Verse 2
But O, what endless woes
Are treasur’d up for them
Who Jesus’ messengers oppose,
And spitefully condemn;
Who scourge them with their tongues,
Who buffet with their lies,
And loading with repeated wrongs
At last to murther rise!

Verse 3
Thro’ pride and malice blind,
The proffer’d grace ye scorn,
The blessings for your soul design’d
Ye into curses turn:
Salvation long refus’d
Your sinful measure fills,
And Christ with all his saints abus’d
Your just damnation seals.

Hymnal/Album: Originally titled: “‘Behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men and scribes; and some of them ye shall kill and crucify, and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city.’—[Matt. 23,] v. 34.” 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 S.T. Kimbrough Jr. and Oliver A. Beckerlegge, eds., The Unpublished Poetry of Charles Wesley, vol. 2 (Nashville: Kingswood Books, 1990), pages 42-43.
Publishing: Public Domain