Who glory in your ripest grace

Verse 1
Who glory in your ripest grace,
Your holiest, purest, perfect love,
Yourselves ye ignorantly praise,
Yourselves abundantly disprove,
Nor can by folly’s fig-leaves hide
Your glaring nakedness of pride.

Verse 2
Impatient to be disbeliev’d,
Is it for God alone ye speak?
Self-confident, and self-deceiv’d,
Your own applause ye blindly seek,
When humble, not in heart, but word,
Ye seem to glory in the Lord.

Verse 3
The smallest spark of self-respect
Of self-esteem, conceal’d within,
Doth all your boasted gifts infect,
And turns your graces into sin:
Self-love and vanity the leaven
Which lifts your swelling souls to heaven.

Verse 4
While there in fancied pomp ye reign
Fond nature’s pride in secret spreads,
With visions turns your heated brain,
With gilded rays adorns your heads,
Till sunk at once ye lose your light
Ye lose your souls in endless night.

Hymnal/Album: Originally titled: “‘Your glorying is not good: know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump?’—[1 Cor.] 5:6.” This hymn appears in the 1783 manuscript “MS Scriptural Hymns.” 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 1977/576, 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 and Oliver A. Beckerlegge, eds., The Unpublished Poetry of Charles Wesley, vol. 2 (Nashville: Kingswood Books, 1990), page 464.
Publishing: Public Domain