“Combined, these two collections comprise every poem or hymn that can be traced with some confidence to the pen of Charles Wesley,” said Dr. Maddox, who is William Kellon Quick Professor of Wesleyan and Methodist Studies at Duke Divinity.

The Rev. Randy Maddox has tracked down, read, scrutinized and collected every one of the thousands of hymns and verses written by Charles Wesley (1707-1788), one of history’s greatest hymn writers and co-founder, along with his brother John, of the Methodist movement.

Now, Dr. Maddox is eager to share them with the rest of the world.

In February, the Center for Studies in the Wesleyan Tradition at Duke Divinity School completed a five-year project which makes publically available, online, all of Charles Wesley’s hymns and verses.

The website, http://divinity.duke.edu/initiatives-centers/cswt/wesley-texts, offers two collections: one of Charles Wesley’s published material, and another of his manuscripts, many of which were never published.

“Combined, these two collections comprise every poem or hymn that can be traced with some confidence to the pen of Charles Wesley,” said Dr. Maddox, who is William Kellon Quick Professor of Wesleyan and Methodist Studies at Duke Divinity.

Not only is the “CW collection” proving a valuable repository for scholarly research, it’s aiding a project that could bring even more of Charles Wesley’s words to life for modern Christians.

Until now, scholars looking to access Charles Wesley’s entire body of work largely relied on 13 volumes edited by George Osborn in the 19th century. While the set represented a “herculean effort in its time,” according to Dr. Maddox, Osborn’s version is hard to find, incomplete, inaccurate in places and only partially indexed.

With the online version, scholars “have everything in one place, it’s all freely accessible, and it’s more accurate,” said Dr. Maddox. If printed, the online CW collection would likely comprise about 15 volumes.

By making the collection free, Dr. Maddox hopes it will become a resource for students and scholars at Methodist schools around the world, including those with limited libraries.

Users may download the texts (they’re in PDF format) and search Charles Wesley’s entire body of work by way of a word search (for example, looking for all of Wesley’s references to the word “humility”) or through an index of first lines of the hymns.

Many Christians are familiar with Charles Wesley’s hymns: About 15-20 are still widely used in churches of various denominations. In the United Methodist Hymnal, he’s credited as the author of more than 60 hymns, poems and responses.

However, thanks in part to this newly-completed online collection, Charles Wesley’s hymns could become familiar to even more Christians. Lester Ruth, research professor of Christian worship at Duke Divinity, says composers are turning to the website as part of an ongoing grassroots project of “re-tuning” classic texts of hymns to make them more accessible to modern worshippers. Composer Bruce Benedict of Raleigh, N.C., for example, is writing new tunes for some of Wesley’s more obscure texts, and frequently cites the online CW collection on his blog at http://cardiphonia.org.

Dr. Ruth, who is president of the Charles Wesley Society, also used the online collection to access texts by Charles Wesley that don’t have any tunes associated with them. He commissioned musicians to write tunes for those texts, and four or five will debut, with new musical settings, when the society gathers for its next annual meeting in Nashville, Tenn., in October.

“It’s great to be able to tell composers that there’s one place you can go to access all of Charles Wesley’s hymnody, and it’s free,” Dr. Ruth said.

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