Lord, when thy love begins to reign

Lord, when thy love begins to reign,
The kingdom seems the smallest grain,
Deeper into the heart descends,
Appears, and gradually extends,
Arrives at full maturity,
A seed, a plant, a shrub, a tree;
And when ten thousand storms are past,
Subsists the same from first to last.

Hymnal/Album: Originally titled: “‘It is like a grain of mustard seed, which when it is sown in the earth, is less than all the seeds &c.’—Mark 4, v. 31, 32.” This hymn appears in the 1766 manuscript “MS Mark.” 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 1977/574, 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 and Oliver A. Beckerlegge, eds., The Unpublished Poetry of Charles Wesley, vol. 2 (Nashville: Kingswood Books, 1990), page 56.
Publishing: Public Domain