How vain our strife to heal

Verse 1
How vain our strife to heal
The plague incurable!
Still the plague remains unstay’d,
Still the issue is undried;
Reason’s philosophic aid
Heightens and inflames our pride.

Verse 2
Endeavouring to restrain,
The law augments our pain:
Virtue’s firm resolve we boast,
Boast our liberty of will;
All our confidence is lost,
Cannot stop the raging ill.

Verse 3
Th’ original disease
Our med’cines but increase:
Happy when at last we know
Human insufficiency,
When we truly humbled go,
Jesus, for relief, to Thee.

Hymnal/Album: Originally titled: “‘A woman having an issue of blood twelve years, which had spent all her living upon physicians, neither could be healed of any.’—[Luke 8,] v. 43.” This hymn appears in the 1766 manuscript “MS Luke.” 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 1977/575, 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. 11 (London: Wesleyan-Methodist Conference Office, 1871), page 173.
Publishing: Public Domain