The world our unrelenting foe

Verse 1
The world, our unrelenting foe,
May false pretences make,
But persecute thy flock, we know,
And hate us for thy sake
Because our God they have not known,
They treat us with despite,
And by their cruel judgments own
Our lives are in the right.

Verse 2
Yet will we not the world upbraid,
The infidels condemn:
Grace only hath the difference made
Betwixt our souls and them:
The grace which we may lose by pride,
May be on them bestow’d,
And when they feel thy blood applied,
They know the pardning God.

Hymnal/Album: Originally titled: “‘But all these things will they do unto you for my names sake, because they know not him that sent me.’—[John 15,] v. 21." This hymn appears in the 1763-64 manuscript “MS John.” 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 1977/573, 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. 12 (London: Wesleyan-Methodist Conference Office, 1871), page 30.
Publishing: Public Domain