Happiness Quote by Charles Wesley

“Laughs at impossibilities” is a startling verb choice for an 18th-century cleric, and that’s the point: Wesley isn’t selling faith as pious fragility but as audacious nerve. The line turns belief into a kind of holy defiance, a posture that refuses to negotiate with circumstance. Faith “sees” the promise before it arrives, then “looks to God alone” with the exclusivity of a vow. There’s an implicit rejection here of worldly intermediaries - status, institutions, even rational probability. If the Enlightenment was busy enthroning reason, Wesley counters with a rival confidence that treats calculation as a lesser authority.

The subtext is pastoral and political at once. Methodism was a movement among ordinary people - miners, laborers, the spiritually overlooked - offering not just salvation but agency. To “cry it shall be done” is to speak like someone who has been denied leverage and finds it elsewhere. The grammar is performative: faith doesn’t merely hope; it declares, as if declaration itself participates in reality. That’s why the stanza stacks muscular verbs (“sees,” “looks,” “laughs,” “cries”) instead of abstract virtues. It reads like a rallying hymn because it functioned as one, meant to be sung in company, turning private conviction into communal stamina.

Wesley’s intent isn’t to deny suffering or complexity; it’s to relocate the battleground. Impossibility becomes a punchline not because life is easy, but because faith, in this framing, changes what counts as the final word.