Pure, inward, genuine piety

Verse 1
Pure, inward, genuin piety
External Christians dread,
With consternation struck to see
The loathsom gangreen spread!
A few, they say, may multiply,
And the whole croud infect;
And every hellish means they try
To stop the growing sect.

Verse 2
But all your policy is blind,
Your threatnings too are vain;
The word of God ye cannot bind,
The Spirit’s course restrain:
In Jesus name we must speak on,
And testify his grace,
And make his pardning mercy known
To all the ransom’d race.

Hymnal/Album: Originally titled: “‘But that it spread no farther among the people, let us straitly threaten them, that they speak henceforth to no man in this name.’—[Acts 4,] v. 17.” This hymn appears in the 1764 manuscript “MS Acts.” 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 1977/555, Charles Wesley Notebooks Box 1). 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 and Oliver A. Beckerlegge, eds., The Unpublished Poetry of Charles Wesley, vol. 2 (Nashville: Kingswood Books, 1990), pages 294–95.
Publishing: Public Domain