From glory to glory advancing

The hymn From glory to glory advancing we praise thee, O Lord is a translation into English (or perhaps rather a paraphrase) from the Greek, of a prayer from the Liturgy of St James. The Liturgy of St James is an ancient liturgy of the Orthodox Churches, relatively rare (in most places it is celebrated only on St James's day). Unfortunately I don't have a copy of the Greek text to hand (I'd need to go to a library to find one) so I'm not going to comment on the quality of the translation in detail (though I will append for interest the relevant words from one of the current English translations of the liturgy). I just thought I'd remark on one fact about the English translation or paraphrase which is what we know as "From Glory to Glory".

The translation is by Charles Humphreys 1840-1921 (noted as "tr. C.W.H." in the English Hymnal). There's no dagger to indicate that the text has been changed in the New English Hymnal, but then they don't seem very concerned to note changes to the words of translated hymns. Apart from the fact that they've written the four two line stanzas as two four line stanzas, they've made one other significant change, and that is to change the order of the words in line 7.

Humphreys wrote (I suppose)

Evermore, O Lord, to thy servants thy presence be nigh...

The editors now insist that we must sing

O Lord, evermore to thy servants thy presence be nigh...

Now you might think that these two versions say the same thing. Presumably the editors thought that they said roughly the same thing. And you might think that the second version fits the music better (in the English Hymnal we used to have to subdivide the minim at the start of that line and then slur the next two minims, because the rhythm of "evermore O" doesn't match that of "From strength unto" at the equivalent place in the first verse.

I expect that this is one of the cases which the editors have in mind when they say in their introduction "Occasionally minor adjustments have been made to secure a better musical accentuation". (For another example, compare their work on "Forth in thy name, O Lord, I go").

But is it a minor adjustment?

It seems to me that "O Lord, evermore to thy servants thy presence be nigh" says something rather different from "Evermore, O Lord, to thy servants thy presence be nigh".

Putting "Evermore" up front indicates that it is the evermore that one is asking the Lord for.

Putting "O Lord" up front removes that, so we don't know what the important part of the request is.

In fact it makes the appeal "O Lord" the most important part. It reads a bit like an exclamation, the sort of thought ("O Lord!") one might have when one realises, in the middle of the sermon, that one has forgotten to turn on the oven to cook the dinner. It certainly seems to me to undermine the poetry of the line

—just as it would if you did the same to "Forth in thy name, O Lord, I go."

Try making that "O Lord, I go forth in thy name".

Why is "forth" up front there when it wouldn't be in ordinary prose? Precisely because in poetry you do that sort of thing to achieve a certain kind of effect. And that is what Charles Humphrey kindly did for us by writing a poetic line beginning "evermore" in his translation of the Liturgy of St James, until the NEH editors saw fit to eliminate his poetry so that we wouldn't have to sing two crotchets instead of a minim.

Ah well. There we are. Another sad case.

Here's the English version of the relevant prayers in the Liturgy of St James:

Dismission prayer, spoken by the Deacon: Going on from glory to glory, we praise Thee, the Saviour of our souls. Glory to Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit now and ever, and to all eternity. We praise Thee, the Saviour of our souls.

XLIX. The Priest says a prayer from the altar to the sacristy: Going on from strength to strength, and having fulfilled all the divine service in Thy temple, even now we beseech Thee, O Lord our God, make us worthy of perfect loving-kindness; make straight our path: root us in Thy fear, and make us worthy of the heavenly kingdom, in Christ Jesus our Lord, with whom Thou art blessed, together with Thy all-holy, and good, and quickening Spirit, now and always, and for ever.

(Translation taken from The Ante Nicene Fathers vol 7)

Jerusalem, my happy home

On Tuesday, which was St James's day, we sang a hymn (number 228 in the New English Hymnal) which begins "Jerusalem thou city blest".

The words, according to the foot of the page, are by the EDITORS.

In the English Hymnal there was a hymn in three parts with 26 verses, for a saint's day procession, which began "Jerusalem my happy home." It seems clear that the NEH editors were trying to model their work on that, since they have retained one verse intact:

In thee no sickness may be seen,
no hurt, no ache, no sore;
In thee there is no dread of death,
But life for evermore.

... write the editors of the New English Hymnal, echoing the editors of the English Hymnal.

That verse, however, had already been revised before it made into the EH. This is what F.B.P. wrote:

In thee no sickness may be seen,
no hurt, no ache, no sore;
there is no death nor ugly devil,
there is life for evermore.

F.B.P is the otherwise unknown author of the 16th century manuscript from which the words were taken. They are said to be based on stuff in St Augustine. But the NEH has not much left of F.B.P. Among the gems that have gone missing are the following:

Thy walls are made of precious stones,
thy bulwarks diamonds square;
thy gates are of right orient pearl;
exceeding rich and rare;

thy turrets and thy pinnacles
with carbuncles do shine;
thy very streets are paved with gold,
surpassing clear and fine;

thy houses are of ivory,
thy windows crystal clear;
thy tiles are made of beaten gold--
O God that I were there!

Within thy gates nothing doth come
that is not passing clean,
no spider's web, no dirt, no dust,
no filth may there be seen.

and a bit further on, these:

We that are here in banishment
continually do mourn:
we sigh and sob, we weep and wail,
perpetually we groan.

and these:

There's nectar and ambrosia made,
there's musk and civet sweet;
there many a fair and dainty drug
is trodden under feet.

There cinnamon, there sugar grows,
there nard and balm abound.
What tongue can tell or heart conceive
the joys that there are found?

And some mention of the saints one might encounter there:

There David stands with harp in hand
as master of the choir:
ten thousand times that man were blessed
that might this music hear.

Our Lady sings Magnificat
with tune surpassing sweet,
and all the virgins bear their parts,
sitting about her feet.

Te deum doth Saint Ambrose sing,
Saint Austin doth the like;
Old Simeon and Zachary
Have not their songs to seek.

There Magdalen hath left her moan,
and cheerfully doth sing
with blessèd saints, whose harmony
in every street doth ring.

So what do we have in the NEH to displace all those vivid individuals and their peculiar joys in heaven? Well we have this:

And praise and honour be to him
Whom earth and heaven obey
For that blest saint whose festival
Doth glorify this day.

Enough said.

The son of consolation

St Barnabas's day was June 11th. I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get round to finishing this post, but I started it some time after the day in question (because I'd forgotten about it, and then I had to put it aside due to other things, and since then I've been away).

The New English Hymnal provides a hymn for St Barnabas, which begins "The 'Son of Consolation', St Barnabas the good". We sang it on June 11th. The words are said to be by "Maud Coote 1852-1935 and EDITORS".

At the foot of the hymn there is a piece of advice to the reader as follows:

See Acts 11.24 'he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith.'

Presumably that's to help us to understand why the hymn goes (in lines 2-4) "St Barnabas the good,/ filled with the Holy Spirit/ And faith in Christ the Lord." Those lines do indeed seem to be a slightly prosaic paraphrase of Acts 11.24.

What the hymn book fails to explain for its readers is the first line of each of the three verses of the hymn as presented in the NEH. These lines go "The 'Son of Consolation'" in verse 1; "The Son of Consolation" in verse 2; "All sons of consolation" in verse 3). What is all this about the "Son of Consolation"? Well the answer is that the reference we really needed, in order to understand the hymn, was Acts 4.36:

Joses, who by the apostles was surnamed Barnabas (which is, being interpreted, The son of consolation), a Levite.

That is, the name "Barnabas" was the nickname that the Apostles gave to Joses, and it meant Son of Consolation ("son" is the "Bar" bit, as in Barabbas, Bartimaeus and so on, all of which are patronymics).

It would have been helpful (it seems to me) if the hymn book had supplied that reference. After all, it seems to be the most crucial key to understanding this hymn.

Why did they give the other text, not this one?

Was it merely an oversight?

No, I think not.

It was, I rather think, because they have a guilty conscience...


They're ashamed of what they've done to this hymn and they're trying to justify it, by showing that their new text is a paraphrase—pedantic and prosaic, but paraphrase all the same— of a biblical text... As though any bad poetry is okay if it can be shown to be an allusion to the bible.

The good old English Hymnal had the whole of this hymn (five verses), all of them in Mrs Coote's own words. Verse 1 of the original begins thus:

The Son of Consolation!
Of Levi’s priestly line,
Filled with the Holy Spirit,
And fervent faith divine,
With lowly self-oblation,
For Christ an offering meet,
He laid his earthly riches
At the apostles’ feet.

The second line here, "Of Levi's priestly line", is also (like "Son of Consolation") alluding to the bit from Acts 4.36 that we quoted above:

Joses, who by the apostles was surnamed Barnabas (which is, being interpreted, The son of consolation), a Levite.

That is, Barnabas was a Levite, one of Levi's priestly line.

For some reason, best known to themselves, the Editors of the NEH have replaced that with

St Barnabas the good

and then justified that revision by supplying the reference to Acts 11.24 where Barnabas is said to be "a good man". I suppose that they thought that we needed to be told in the hymn itself that we were singing about St Barnabas. But that's surely not necessary, since the page is headed "St Barnabas". It seems to me that if you've taken the trouble to go to church on St Barnabas's day, and you find yourself singing a hymn headed "St Barnabas, June 11th", you'd have to be very stupid not to realise that the person the hymn was talking about was St Barnabas. On the other hand, it's quite useful to be reminded that he was a Levite (in case you don't know the Book of Acts off by heart).

This is the most significant change in verse 1. The rest of that verse has been subjected to a variety of small alterations of an apparently pointless sort. Verse 2 has gone completely. Mrs Coote wrote as follows about the comforting significance of Barnabas's nick name, and about his ministry to the gentiles:

The Son of Consolation!
O name of soothing balm!
It fell on sick and weary
Like breath of Heaven’s own calm!
And the blest Son of Comfort
With fearless loving hand
The Gentiles’ great apostle
Led to the faithful band.

It seems to me that the omission of that verse is a great mistake, since it is that verse that meditates on the name "Son of Consolation" and asks why it is appropriate. Without that verse, the repetition of that name at the start of each verse is kind of vacuous.

Verse 3 in Maud Coote's original was about Barnabas's martyrdom:

The Son of Consolation!
Drawn near unto his Lord,
He won the martyr’s glory,
And passed to his reward;
With him is faith now ended,
For ever lost in sight,
But love, made perfect, fills him
With praise, and joy, and light.

It survives in the NEH, with trivial alterations, as verse 2.

Maud Coote's fourth verse has, however, been cut out. This verse reflected on the significance of the "Son of Consolation" title, this time as something for us to aspire to. Once again, we might observe that without it, the whole conceit on which the original poem was grounded has been cut away and become empty. It went as follows:

The Son of Consolation!
Lord, hear our humble prayer,
That each of us Thy children
This blessèd name may bear;
That we, sweet comfort shedding
O’er homes of pain and woe,
’Midst sickness and in prisons,
May seek Thee here below.

Finally, the last verse (following on from that idea that we might aspire to the title "son of consolation") thinks about how we too (if we do take on that role) can look forward to eternal life, receiving the same reward as the martyr Barnabas. A version of this last verse survives, badly mutilated in the NEH. But unfortunately its point is completely lost, because the preceding verse that explained how there could be many "Sons of Consolation", and that they would be us, once we'd taken on Barnabas as our role model, has been omitted.

Here's what Coote wrote:

The Sons of Consolation!
O what their bliss shall be
When Christ the King shall tell them,
“Ye did it unto Me!”
The merciful and loving
The Lord of life shall own,
And as His priceless jewels,
Shall set them round His throne.

Here's what the NEH EDITORS have substituted:

All sons of consolation,
How great their joys will be
When Christ the King shall tell them
'You did it unto me':
The merciful and loving
The loving Lord shall own,
And set them as his jewels
Around the Father's throne.

Well, it means much the same (so much so that you can't really see what's the point of interfering), but the real tragedy is that we've lost the point of the hymn altogether. If you think about it, the hymn was designed to reflect on Barnabas, under the description "Son of Consolation", as a role model for us. But without the verses the engineer that set of thoughts, it no longer does that for us.

In the NEH the last verse appears to be about some other people, sons of consolation. These will be Barnabas, we suppose, and anyone else, presumably male, who goes by that name. It doesn't seem to be about us.

In Coote's original by contrast, even though that too was in the third person plural, we already knew that it might and should include us, because we'd already reflected on how one could acquire the name "son of consolation" in virtue of the deeds of love that one might do.

But we've lost all that in the omission of the two crucial verses.

So it doesn't say what it needs to say any more.

Oh dear. How sad.

There, dear Lord, we shall receive thee in the solemn sacrament

On Thursday, which was Corpus Christi, we sang All for Jesus, All for Jesus.

It's a splendid catholic hymn (or was), which comes from Stainer's Crucifixion. The words are (or were) by W.J. Sparrow-Simpson. It wasn't in the English Hymnal, but a version of it is in the New English Hymnal.

Here's how it should go:

All for Jesus—all for Jesus,
this our song shall ever be;
for we have no hope, nor Saviour,
if we have not hope in thee.

All for Jesus—thou wilt give us
strength to serve thee, hour by hour,
none can move us from thy presence,
while we trust thy love and power.

All for Jesus—at thine altar
thou wilt give us sweet content;
there, dear Lord, we shall receive thee
in the solemn sacrament.

All for Jesus—thou hast loved us;
all for Jesus—thou hast died;
all for Jesus—thou art with us;
all for Jesus crucified.

All for Jesus—all for Jesus--
this the Church's song must be;
till, at last, her sons are gathered
one in love and one in thee.

It's a pity that the editors of the NEH can't leave a good piece of sentimental slush alone. It's fine as it stands. But they've been unable to resist two or three destructive interventions.

First, in verse three they've rewritten the verse in the present tense instead of the future. So instead of "thou wilt give us sweet content" we have "thou dost give us sweet content", and in order to change "we shall receive thee" to "we receive thee" they've had to change "Lord" to "Saviour" to fill out the metre. So we have "There, dear Saviour, we receive thee" instead of "There dear Lord we shall receive thee."

I presume the idea is to adjust the tenses so that the hymn can be used in the communion slot at a Eucharistic service. It would, doubtless, be a little odd to sing "There dear Lord we shall receive thee" on one's way back from the altar. But does that make it okay just to muck it all up? Why not just put a note on it to say that it's a hymn for earlier in the service or for benediction?

But what is perhaps even worse is the last line of that verse, where, for no apparent reason "In the solemn sacrament" (nice) has become "In thy holy sacrament" (boring!).

Finally, there is the last verse. Here, alas, the editors have made one of their rare forays into political correctness (at least I suppose it's that). "Till at last her sons are gathered" has become "Till at last the flock is gathered". "Her sons" was "the Church's sons" (that is all of us). I rather like it when we remember to think of the church as our mother, and to refer to her in the feminine, so I must say I deeply lament the passing of that nice thought, that the Church is a she and we are her sons. I can't say I've ever had any difficulty identifying myself as one of those sons. It has, in fact, a rather nice inclusive feel, because it is clear that one's gender is quite irrelevant to one's status as a "son" in this context. So I think it would be more inclusive to keep that than to eliminate it.

The lack of Greek headings

I noticed this morning again, looking at hymn 421 "O King Enthroned on High", that the NEH doesn't give the Greek for the first line of hymns translated from the Greek, as the EH used to do.

It does for Latin, but not for Greek. Not for Syriac either, nor Slavonic, nor Irish, nor Welsh. Since the Welsh wouldn't involve a funny script, it's presumably not for reasons of typesetting. So why?

Dumbing down? They don't see why we want to know? Well I can tell you there are lots of reasons why one might need to know, and the lack of an index of the original first lines of translated hymns is a real indication of the failure on the part of the NEH editors to understand what things might matter in searching for a particular hymn in a hymn book. Since the EH had one, presumably they consciously chose not to have one, just to make things less helpful?

What is rigid gently bend

Yet another preacher after my own heart!

Today we had a sermon from the Revd Canon Donald Gray (Canon Emeritus of Westminster and former Speaker's Chaplain).

It being Whitsun we'd been singing the Whitsun hymns, including Veni Sancte Spiritus, aka the Golden Sequence, which appears in the New English Hymnal at 139 and also at 520 where it has its proper plainsong tune (pity we didn't sing that if you ask me).

But to get to the point.

Canon Gray observed that the New English Hymnal has (alas) substituted for J.M. Neale's much loved translation (familiarly known by its first line "Come thou Holy Paraclete"), a translation said to be by J.M. Neale and EDITORS. Bad news, that "and EDITORS" you might say, and indeed Canon Gray was lamenting parts of J.M. Neale's translation that have gone missing, lost in a quagmire of editorial "improvements" in verse 4. Since I'd just been contemplating (during the first hymn) writing on the loss of J.M. Neale's verse 4 in this blog this afternoon (as indeed, here I am doing so), my heart warmed to Canon Gray at once.

Here's what he was lamenting. The first three lines of verse 4 used to go like this in the English Hymnal:

What is soilèd, make thou pure;
What is wounded, work its cure;
What is parchèd fructify.

It was the word 'fructify' in particular that seemed to Canon Gray so rich, and so evocative, and not adequately captured in the new version ("bring to life the arid soul") that has been substituted in the NEH. The sermon was, effectively, on how important it is that we be fructified by the Holy Spirit when parched.

But let's look a little more closely at what's happened here.

Here's what the Latin says:

Lava quod est sordidum,
riga quod est aridum,
sana quod est saucium

Literally: "wash what is dirty, irrigate what is dry, heal what is wounded" The rhythm of the short lines with "quod est" in each of them is captured by Neale in the repeated structure "what is ... " which is an exact translation of the phrases. The original Latin leaves open what these items that are dirty, dry or wounded might be. Our imagination can, of course, easily supply possible examples, but I assume that the Holy Spirit is free to apply this treatment to anything and everything that fits the description "what is dirty, what is dry, what is wounded."

Getting rid of the heavy handed repetition of "what is ..." at the beginning of Neale's lines may seem initially attractive. But it does not make for an accurate nor a memorable series of thoughts. For one thing, the NEH editors have seen fit to specify what items the Spirit is to apply his attentions to:

Sinful hearts (not what is dirty) do thou make whole (not clean)
Bring to life (not water) the arid soul (not what is dry)

And (later, postponed to the end of the verse)

Wounded souls (not what is wounded) their hurt allay (not heal).

So instead of a general prayer to the Holy Spirit to treat whatever can respond to these treatments, we now identify that the items are sinful hearts, arid souls, wounded souls. Does this matter? Well, yes, first because it's prosaic, pedantic, boring and dull. And also because it prescribes thoughts, rather than inviting them. The original left us to think theologically and to see applications in all aspects of our lives.

The Golden Sequence comes in sets of three lines. There are three more lines that have gone into verse 4 in the English version. Here they are in Latin:

Flecte quod est rigidum,
fove quod est frigidum,
rege quod est devium.

Literally, "Bend what is rigid, warm what is cold, correct what is wayward."

J.M. Neale continued his rather heavyhanded lines that begin with the "what is..." phrase as follows for these lines:

What is rigid gently bend;
what is frozen warmly tend;
Straighten what goes erringly.

Now it has to be said that these lines have been a source of much mirth in their day. Many a Pentecost have I seen the King's Choral Scholars crippled with the giggles, even though Neale did not, as he might have done, choose to write "what is frigid warmly tend". But still, I do feel that the substitute in the NEH is not really fit for the job. Here it is:

Make the stubborn heart unbend,
To the faint, new hope extend,

And (going back to the middle line of the verse, because they've done them out of order)

Guide the feet that go astray.

Once again, the editors have seen fit to specify what the object to be treated by the Spirit is: the stubborn heart (for "what is rigid"), the faint, presumably faint people (for what is cold, but why and how is faint a good translation for cold?), and the feet that go astray (for what is wayward).

But "feet"?

Why "feet"?

It's not literally feet that the Spirit is interested in, surely? I mean we're not talking about redirecting us when we've taken a wrong turning on the roads. We're talking about redirecting us when we've taken a wrong turning in life. But it's not our feet that do that, is it? What is it? Wouldn't it be better not to try to cash out the metaphor? Wouldn't it be better to leave the work to the imaginiation?

I presume we couldn't have hearts or souls again because we'd already had those twice each in the wretched new translation, so for the sake of variatio they chose "feet" as the kind of thing that could go astray?

And now again,

Why did they transpose the third and sixth lines of the verse?

I'm mystified.

Since the two lines rhyme with each other and make perfectly good sense in their proper position, this seem a completely random and unmotivated decision. Why? I don't know why.

This week's competition:

Rewrite J.M. Neale's lines for verse 4 in such a way as to avoid using "what is..." as the first words of each line, avoiding the awkward invertion of object and verb, and avoiding the artificial articulation of -éd on past tenses that are normally pronounced as one syllable.
Do that without stipulating what the items that are to be treated are.

The prize: glory everlasting.

New thread on the BBC message board

Please join in the discussion of the English Hymnal on the Radio Three message board by clicking the link on the title of this post.

Feed the faint and hungry heathen

Today we sang Judge Eternal, Throned in Splendour. It's one of the hymns that has suffered at the hands of misguided political correctness, with rather unfortunate effects.

The hymn was written in 1902 by Henry Scott Holland. He was not just a committed Christian Socialist but also an academic theologian, and at the end of his life was Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford from 1910 until his death in 1918—when he seems to have been 71, so I suppose he must have been appointed to the chair at the age of 63—he'd done a few other things first, including being precentor of St Paul's Cathedral.

The hymn Judge Eternal Throned in Splendour—probably the only one he ever wrote—appeared in the journal that he edited for twenty-two years, called the Commonwealth. The journal (and the hymn too) was devoted to the social application of the Christian faith.

The hymn is about "this realm" its cities, its homesteads, its woodlands, and about the weary folk in them who are pining for release from "bitter things". Doubtless the bitter things are the social problems that afflict them. The hymn is a call to Christians to do something about it, cast in the form of a prayer to God to purge "this realm" of the social evils that afflict it. Perhaps, writing in the early twentieth century, Henry Scott Holland may have had in mind England, or Britain, in particular as the 'realm' that needed to be purged. But notice that he says "this realm", "this empire" not "our realm" or "our empire". So he might just mean this earthly realm as opposed to the heavenly realm, though doubtless the choice of vocabulary is meant to bring to mind the vocabulary of British sovereignty as a kind of image with which to reflect on the way in which the world depends upon God for its common weal—, but even if he did mean Britain or the British Empire more specifically, I think one could sing it about any land and any state and find that its message applied then and still applies now. Only the "woodlands" sound a bit too English to be freely transferable to any and every country. Similarly the "wide dominion" in verse 1 (solace all its wide dominion with the healing of thy wings) might be inviting us to think in terms of the areas under the dominion of Britain; but does it do that literally, or does it continue the metaphor of treating the whole world as a kind of empire under one dominion (the dominion of God). Either way, it applies the hymn's social message to more than just the island we happen to live on.

The verse that causes offence and the foolish interference on the part of recent editors is verse 3. This is what Henry wrote:

Crown, O God, Thine own endeavour;
Cleave our darkness with Thy sword;
Feed the faint and hungry heathen
With the richness of Thy word;
Cleanse the body of this Empire
Through the glory of the Lord.

For some reason that I don't quite understand it's not acceptable to call anyone a heathen these days, even if they are heathens. So that word has to go, even though we do really want to feed the heathen with the riches of God's word. At least I think we do. But it's not clear what the hymn book editors think we want to do. They make us sing this:

Feed the faithless and the hungry
With the richness of thy word.

It appears that they think we want to feed the hungry, people who are literally hungry, but feed them not with food but with the word of God. That seems to me to be inappropriate. If people are hungry they should be fed food. The word of God is no substitute for bread. So I'm certainly happy to ask God to feed the hungry, but not to specify that it should be feeding them metaphorically, with words instead of bread.

But it's not just that they're unclear on whether we want to feed the hungry. It's that they've missed why we described the heathen as faint and hungry: it's as if they thought that Henry Scott Holland meant that the heathen were literally faint and hungry, as though being heathen and being hungry were somehow connected. But it's not food they hunger for, it's the word of God. That's what it is to be heathen: to be lacking in this spiritual nourishment that is the remedy for the kind of pining and misery that Scott Holland had been describing in the earlier verses. So feeding the faint and hungry heathen with the word of God is to give them what they hunger for. To give it to the hungry is not.

But they've also removed the word 'heathen' and replaced it with 'faithless'. I suppose they think that 'faithless' means the same thing only without the derogatory overtones of 'heathen'. So they do sort of grant that we might care about the heathen and not just about believers; they do sort of grant that the social problems include the fact that some folk have never heard the word of God. But those people are not "the faithless". That term just does not mean people who have not been taught the faith, which is what Scott Holland meant. "Faithless" means someone who breaks faith, someone who lets you down. Now that is derogatory: to call someone faithless just because they've never been told the good news is deeply unfair. There's another hymn that uses that term correctly ("And we, shall we be faithless, shall hearts fail, hands hang down...?"). But it's quite simply JUST THE WRONG WORD HERE.

But are we perhaps in denial? Is it that the editors think they speak for us when they try to pretend that there are no heathen in this country, no one whose hunger for spiritual nourishment we should satisfy? Surely we need to ask ourselves whether we have made any progress, since Scott Holland wrote this, towards ensuring that the young people (even in this country, let alone in the rest of the world) have ever heard the word of God. I rather suspect there are more heathen in this country than there were when he wrote it, and that it would be a good thing if singing this hymn with its proper words were to remind us of what a shameful fact that is (shameful for us, I mean).

There's a question, I think, about what Scott Holland meant by "this Empire" in the last verse. It's the same question as the one in the first verse about the scope of "realm" and the scope of "its dominion". Is he specifically referring to British territory, and the need to clean up our act on British soil, or is he using the metaphor of Empire to refer to the whole world as an empire under one sovereign? I'm not sure. But the metaphorical reading is perfectly good, and makes good sense of the hymn. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the New English Hymnal quite destroys it by substituting "nation" for Empire in the last verse. I don't see that we can think of the world as a nation. One thing that God's world is not is a nation. So that by doing that the editors exclude the non-nationalistic reading and force us to take the hymn nationalistically, narrowly, politically.

Suppose we keep Empire. There are two ways of reading the hymn then, if we still want to sing it in the twenty-first century in Church.

Either we can sing it (as we do many others that invoke traditional motifs) as a relic of a historic period in which Britain had a political responsibility to ensure the social welfare of a wide dominion. Singing old poetry that speaks in a language we wouldn't standardly use to day is not a problem. It's part of what adds to our sense of belonging to a communion that stretches back through time.
Or alternatively we can read it metaphorically, taking ourselves as belonging to an empire, God's empire, in which God will try to bring succour to all his subject peoples.

Both readings help us to enter into the spirit of this hymn.

But to change the words is to destroy what is distinctive about the hymn and to undermine its imagery.

So for heaven's sake! Just give us the words the poet wrote, not some garbled version... Give us a hymn book in which we can actually read the words that the poet wrote. If people don't understand it, then they shouldn't sing it. Or better still, they should learn to understand it. How better than by singing it and learning to think reflectively, through its quaint words, about our place in the world and in history?

A little light entertainment

This 21st century updated version of "The day thou gavest" is by Amy Robinson, passed on to me by Annie Osborne.

EVENING HYMN

The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended
The darkness falls at thy behest
To thee my morning prayers should have ascended
But I was grumpy and sleepy and stressed.

I'm sorry, Lord, that I have stumbled
Through today without your word;
And any prayer I might have mumbled
I'd be surprised if you have heard.

And I will soon be deep in slumber
My night time prayers cut off midway,
I wouldn't like to count the number
Of things that I'll forget to say.

But wait here, Lord, while I am sleeping,
You know the troubles of my heart,
And when my snooze alarm starts beeping,
Help me to make a better start.

I believe and trust in him

Well I said this blog is about other sad tales as well...

Today's entry is not about the damage done to hymn books but about baptism.

Baptism is the rite of initiation into the Church. It involves the believer making a commitment, the basic minimum commitment that counts for making you a Christian. To mark that commitment the person is baptised, with water, in the name of the three persons of the Trinity (which is what he or she has committed herself to), and thereby becomes a member of the Church. If the person is too little to utter her trust in God, someone else utters it on her behalf. At the font the priest asks the candidate "Do you believe and trust in God...?" He or she asks this three times, once for each person of the Trinity.

There are, it seems to me, roughly three clear uses of the verb "to believe". Unfortunately this can lead to confusion.

One use of the verb "believe" is in epistemic contexts, where the content of the belief can be expressed using a sentence introduced by "that...". I believe that the world is round. I believe that three is a prime number. I believe that God created the world. Some beliefs are false, and some beliefs are true. One can also know that three is a prime number, but not everyone who believes it knows it. One can think that three is a prime number, or be of the opinion that it is. "To believe" is very much like "to think" in this sense, when believe or think is followed by a clause beginning "that...". "I think that lunch is ready" means much the same as "I believe that lunch is ready".

Another use of the verb "believe" is followed by "in such and such" and is a bit like a belief that such and such exists. "I don't believe in fairies" or "I don't believe in Father Christmas" means (roughly) I don't believe that there are any fairies, or I don't believe that Father Christmas exists.

A third use of the verb "believe" is also followed by "in such and such" but it isn't about the existence of the object specified, but about whether that thing is something to which one assigns importance and value in one's life—whether one owes commitment, allegiance and trust to it; whether one fights valiantly on its behalf against all that threatens or opposes it. The grammatical construction of this expression (I don't believe in wasting energy) is exactly the same as the one about existence, but it doesn't mean the same.

I remember walking up Warwick Street in Oxford, accompanied by a small child called Sarah, one day in the early 1990s. The street was lined with parked cars either side. Sarah looked up at me and asked quizzically "Why don't you have a car?". "We don't believe in cars," said I. "You don't believe in cars? But look! There are cars over there, and there and there!" said Sarah. "Oh no," I said "I don't mean we don't believe they exist. I mean we don't believe they are a good thing." What I really meant was that we didn't put having a car as a priority in our lives: on the contrary we put not having a car as a high priority.

"I don't believe in God" can be used in either of these last two senses. It's quite commonly used in the sense that is about existence, because most of the people who don't believe that God exists never get as far as asking themselves whether they believe in him in the sense of owing allegiance to him. That's not accidental, perhaps, because if God exists he is important to you, but if he doesn't he isn't.

The result is that when you say you do believe in God, you might be meaning it in either of these two senses. You might be saying that you believe that God exists, or you might be saying that this God has a significant place in your life— the place that God occupies in the life of a believer. Anyone who says it in one sense will also, if asked, say it in the other sense. This means that it's very easy to confuse the two.

The Church is interested in all three of these senses of "to believe".

It is interested in the first sense when it is concerned about teaching and doctrine. In its more dogmatic moments the Church finds it necessary to formulate various facts and propositions about God and about other things, which it takes to be true and thinks that the believer should learn to affirm. It insists, for example, that the world was made by God the Father. This is one of the doctrines to which we are expected to assent if we are being tested for heresy (since some of the gnostic heretics used, plausibly enough, to suppose that the world was too grotty and uncomfortable to have been made by a good god, so the real god was not the creator). Another of these facts that we are required to believe is that Jesus died on the cross and rose again on the third day. This too we have to be prepared to assent to if necessary, since it is heretical to hold that Jesus merely appeared to die but was actually spirited away out of the body first. These are matters that had to be clarified in the early years of the Church, in order to decide which branches of the Church were thinking on the right lines. The creeds that we still recite today formulate a set of anti-heretical propositions designed to test a person for accurate doctrines should there be a challenge to that person's orthodoxy.

The Church is interested in the second sense of belief when it is dealing with philosophy of religion, and particularly in arguments against sceptics. The most obvious challenge is from the idea that there is no god at all, but there are other questions of existence: do you believe in life after death? Do you believe in heaven? Do you believe in the devil? Do you believe in the virgin birth? These are about whether the entities or the events exist or occurred as described. These are closely related to beliefs of the first sort, in that belief in the virgin birth might be described either as "belief in the virgin birth" or "believing that Jesus was born of a virgin". So belief in the existence of something can also be a mark of orthodoxy.

But it is the third sense of belief that is at issue in the baptism service. We are asked whether we turn to Christ, whether we renounce evil, whether we believe and trust in the three persons of the Trinity. These are questions about the allegiance we owe, the trust we place. After we make the declaration of allegiance, we are greeted by other members whose values and commitments are the same: they greet us and encourage us to hold fast, to fight valiantly against sin the world and the devil. These commitments are about placing God as a person with over-riding significance in one's life. They are not about what doctrinal statements one affirms.

Consider this conversation:

John: Do you believe and trust in Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury?

Mary: I believe that he was born in Wales, graduated from Cambridge, took his PhD from Oxford, was for some time at Mirfield and then in Cambridge, became Professor in Oxford in 1987 and Bishop of Monmouth in 1991, and was chosen as Archbishop of Canterbury a few years ago.

John: Yes, I know all that. But do you believe in him?

Mary doesn't answer John's question. His question is about Mary's attitude to the Archbishop, and she never offers any account of that. She talks past John.

Doesn't something rather similar happen when (in the new rite that passes as a baptismal rite in the C of E) the priest holds this conversation with the candidate and her godparents:

Priest: Do you believe and trust in God the Father who made the world?

Candidate: I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth.

Priest: Do you believe and trust in his Son Jesus Christ?

Candidate: I believe in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried. He descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

"Well," you might say, "the candidate is just defining who it is she believes in, just to make quite sure that we're talking about the same person." After all presumably that was why the Priest asked about "God the Father who made the world" just to make sure that we're clear who he's asking about. So the candidate says "yes, if this is who you mean, that's who I'm committing my trust to".

But I don't think that defence will work.

First because the candidate omits the crucial word "trust". Her reply bypasses the priest's question, just as Mary's answer bypassed John's question about belief in the Archbishop. The priest should say to the candidate: "Yes, I know who you mean, but do you believe and trust in him? You've only told me what I already know about the facts of his life."

And second, because the next exchange shows clearly that the candidate has got completely the wrong end of the stick:

Priest: Do you believe and trust in the Holy Ghost?

Candidate: I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy catholic Church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. 

This is a list of completely irrelevant items. Mary might as well have said to John: "And I believe in Father Christmas and the day after tomorrow" when asked whether she trusts the Archbishop.

Aside from the fact that these items have no place in a baptismal rite, it looks as though at least some of these claims to "believe in" certain items are statements of the second sort of belief, that is belief in the existence of things that might be in doubt. Although a belief in the holy catholic Church looks plausibly like a statement of trust or allegiance, the others look more like intellectual affirmations of the truth of certain doctrines or the occurrence of certain events.

So the priest asks for an utterance that expresses allegiance to the Trinity. He gets a series of disconnected utterances that describe the items about which he asked, and a few others about which he did not ask. He doesn't get an expression of trust, which is what he asked for.

Why does he need to ask? One feature of the third sort of belief is that you don't need to ask a person, and the person doesn't need to utter their belief, because "belief in" someone is manifested in one's way of life, in one's behaviour towards the person whom one trusts (in the fact that one turns to Christ, in the fact that one fights valiantly, in the fact that one renounces evil). When Peter says "You know that I love you" to the risen Lord, he doesn't mean that he had told him before. He means that Jesus already understands that even though Peter had uttered a denial, that denial was not after all a true expression of his level of commitment —and Jesus knows that not just because Jesus can see into Peter's heart in a way we can't. Jesus knows that Peter loves him because of how Peter behaves.

So this sort of belief in someone is open to children and animals: you don't need to be able to talk; you don't need to be able to think that x or y is true. It is not an intellectual assent to doctrines: it is an attitude to something or someone in whom one trusts. When the candidate is asked to utter an expression of it, the point of that is to affirm it openly before the congregation, but the utterance isn't in itself the belief, nor is it necessarily the best way to express the belief. Far from it: the belief is best expressed in the act of turning to Christ, in the process of growing up to be one of his. The utterance is a bit of evidence that one is a believer, but the real evidence of that kind of trust is in one's way of life.

It seems to me, therefore, that it is crucially important to keep the baptism service clear of any formulae that look like credal statements of doctrine, and keep it as a service that asks for a simple expression of trust. We need to realise that when the Priest names the three persons of the Trinity he is pointing, each time, to a person and asking "Do you place your trust in that person?". The only answer required is "yes". Nothing more. Baptism marks that act of faith.

So when I am asked to "renew my baptismal vows" I'm afraid I repeat just the words that were said for me at my baptism: "I believe and trust in him". Since I didn't make any other vows then, I don't see how, logically, I can renew them now.

Bring back trust I say: the simple trust of little children.

Hail thee festival day

The English Hymnal included three of the four versions of the hymn Salve festa dies, one for Easter, one for Ascension, one for Whitsun. They were provided separately, though there was one common verse repeated in the first two hymns. The fourth hymn, for Corpus Christi, is apparently not included in any of our current hymn books and was not included in the English Hymnal.

The New English Hymnal has cut out the Whitsun version of the hymn altogether (despite the fact that Ian Bradley, The Penguin Book of Hymns 157, informs me that this is the one most widely sung nowadays--probably not true any more given the pernicious invasiveness of the NEH in otherwise sound places of worship).

It has also attempted, rather inelegantly, to combine the Easter and Ascension versions in a single printing-- an economy which is hardly helpful, given that it generally means that the priest has to make an intrusive announcement at that most special moment when the Mass of Easter day begins, to guard against total chaos emerging around the end of verse 7 (if it hasn't already emerged by the end of the first chorus). Indeed it's hard to think that this is much of an economy, since the two hymns together take up 8 pages of the hymn book and both tunes have to be printed twice over (i.e. four tunes are printed). The English Hymnal got round this by providing Vaughan Williams' tune only once, and the plainsong all three times (but neatly with just the plainsong staves not all the extra lines of accompaniment, so they take up little space).

The other effect of combining the two versions of the hymn is that we get a poor selection of verses. In the English Hymnal the Easter hymn had 11 verses, of which five no longer survive, and the Ascension hymn had 10 of which two no longer survive (instead we sing four of the ascension verses at Easter as well, and one of the Easter verses at Ascension as well). In addition of course seven verses from the Whitsun version have disappeared. So we are deprived of fourteen verses in total.

Not that the EH had all the verses by any means. The Latin version that I've traced appears to have 100 lines (50 two line stanzas). It's not entirely clear what the status of the separate versions is, or how they relate to the words of Bishop Venantius Fortunatus (who lived from 530 to 609). I think the answer must be that modern hymn book editors have chopped up Venantius Fortunatus's 100 lines to make several hymns (but since I can't see any of the Whitsun or Corpus Christi verses in the Latin that I've got in front of me, and the EH tells us that the Easter and Ascension ones are from the Sarum Processional and the Whitsun one from the York Processional, I suspect there must have been different versions in different places, with added verses for those feasts).

The New English Hymnal claims that its words are by "Editors, based on the Latin of Venantius Fortunatus." This seems a trifle unfair, since those verses that they have preserved from the EH were translated by known individuals who deserve to be named (Maurice F Bell for the Easter ones, Percy Dearmer for the Ascension ones). Granted they've made a few changes: Percy's "Gay is the woodland with leaves, bright are the meadows with flowers" has become "Green is the woodland with leaves, bright are the meadows with flowers", and it's been tacked (probably correctly) onto "Daily the loveliness grows.." (also by Percy Dearmer) instead of "Christ in his triumph ascends..." (which has become, as a different verse, "Christ in thy triumph ascend...", again probably correctly), but this seems to me to be revision of an existing translation, not a translation by the editors from the Latin.

The plainsong tune has got somewhat displaced from communal memory by the success of Vaughan Williams' tune called (somewhat confusingly) salva festa dies (confusingly because that's what the plainsong tune is called).

However, having spent this Easter Sunday in the congregation instead of in the choir has caused me to notice that people can't get the idea of how you fit the words to the tunes for the verses, in Vaughan Williams' tune. It's not actually that difficult, but people seem to get confused. I see that in the English Hymnal it specifies in no uncertain terms that the verses are to be sung by "Clerks only". In fact the Clerks are to sing the chorus first time, then the "Clerks only" sing the verses, while the people sing the chorus each time. So the assumption is that the boys and the congregation don't need to deal with the verses at all. I think perhaps there's something to be said for that. It would recapture something of the old plainsong feel of it.

Not that the original Latin hymn had a refrain: it was just 100 lines of Elegiac couplets (it's the rendering of this into Elegiac couplets in English that produces the complexity for fitting it to the tune, and perhaps the ability to sing this tune comes with being suitably steeped in such things).

Now is eternal life

Now is eternal life
If risen with Christ we stand...

Words by Canon George Wallace Briggs, scholar of Emmanuel College Cambridge and sometime vicar of St Andrew's Church in Norwich, in the which parish I am one of only ten residents. Twentieth Century hymn writer, lived from 1875-1959.

Well I'm puzzled by this hymn. It turns out not to be in the English Hymnal (not surprisingly I suppose since the hymn was presumably written somewhat after that book was compiled). But the hymn seems to me to be more familiar than its sparse distribution in the existing hymn books would warrant.

The other puzzle is that if you'd asked me cold, I would have said that the words of the first verse as it appears in the NEH were not what Briggs wrote. In fact I can't back up that hunch from any source that I've discovered so far, though I have found something else wrong with the version in the NEH.

So here's what it says in the first verse:

Now is eternal life,
If risen with Christ we stand,
In him to life reborn,
And holden in his hand;
No more we fear death's ancient dread,
In Christ arisen from the dead.

The theology is Pauline. "If risen with Christ we stand" comes from Colossians 2:12 "Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God..." and Colossians 3:1 "If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above". That's the source of the first four lines, though the image of rebirth is not there (but perhaps from I Peter 1:23?).

The hypothetical "if risen with Christ we stand" is reminiscent not just of that "if ye then be risen" of Colossian 3:1, but even more so of I Corinthians 15 (12 Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead...; 13 but if there be no resurrection...; 14 and if Christ be not risen...; 15 if so be that the dead rise not...; 16 for if the dead rise not...; 17 and if Christ be not raised...; 19 if in this life only we have hope...; ); but one can also trace the same ideas in Romans 6, which also has the baptismal theme. And the idea that death has lost its ancient dread also recalls the end of I Corinthians 15.

I think it was the reminiscence of the I Corinthians 15 material that made me think that the end of this verse should go "If Christ be risen from the dead". Perhaps there's some other reason, but right now it looks as if that thought is mere fantasy.

But this is what I have found about the version in the NEH.

First they have left out a verse. Between verse 1 (shown above) and verse 3 (which appears below) there should be verse 2. It goes like this:

Man long in bondage lay,
Brooding o'er life's brief span;
Was it, O God, for naught,
For naught thou madest man?
Thou art our hope, our vital breath;
Shall hope undying end in death?

This appears to me to be a meditation on I Corinthians 15:14 and 19, the thought that our faith is in vain if Christ be not risen, and that if we have hope only in this life then are we of all men the most miserable.

Verse 3 appears to be only minimally altered by the NEH (spurious words shown in brackets):

And (For) God, the living God,
Stooped down to man's estate;
By death destroying death,
Christ opened wide life's gate:
He lives, who died; he reigns on high;
Who lives in him shall never die.

One could spend some time working out the allusions to various bits of the New Testament in that verse, but I shall move on to the last one now.

Verse 4 goes like this, as Briggs wrote it (I assume):

Unfathomed love divine,
Reign thou within my heart;
From thee nor depth nor height,
Nor life nor death can part;
My life is hid in God with thee,
Now and through all eternity.

The imagery is from Romans 8:38-9 (Neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor powers nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God...) and from Colossians 3:3 (For ye are dead and your life is hid with Christ in God). Here Briggs re-writes the latter from the position of the believer addressing Christ, not Paul addressing the believer, so he has us say my life is hid with thee (namely Christ, as in Colossians) in God.

For some obscure reason best known to the hymn book editors (perhaps, if they know what they're doing at all) line 5 has been rendered thus in the NEH:

Our life is hid with God in thee.

Is God hidden in Christ? That was not what St Paul said. Are we hidden in Christ with God? That was not what St Paul said. So why are we singing this garbage in Church? Does anyone know what it means? I certainly don't.

As for the change from singular to plural, that too seems to be entirely gratuitous. After all we have already had "reign thou within my heart" in verse 4, so we've moved into thinking singular already by that stage. There's no good reason that I can see to resist the move to applying the Pauline lessons to one's own individual faith, which is clearly the intentionof this verse.

PANGE LINGUA

Ian Robins observed to me today that the New English Hymnal has a mistake in the Latin at the headings of both the Pange Lingua hymns.

That is

Hymn 78 (Sing my tongue the glorious battle) is headed pangue lingua gloriosi proelium certaminis


and

hymn 268 (Of the glorious body telling) is headed pangue lingua gloriosi corporis mysterium.

Since when was the verb pangere (to compose or write verses) written with a u? Or since when was its second person imperative form written with a u? I am not aware of any verb that has such a form.

The title of the tune is correctly written PANGE LINGUA in both cases.

Does any detective have a way of discovering how this new corruption arrived in the NEH?

There's a wideness in God's mercy

Frederick W Faber, 1814-63 was a follower of John Henry Newman, who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1846. He published Souls of men why will ye scatter (a hymn of 13 verses, one of which begins "There's a wideness in God's mercy") in his collection Oratory Hymns of 1854.

Here are the 13 verses. I am unsure of the original order but I think it's correct here up to about verse 6.

1 Souls of men! why will ye scatter
Like a crowd of frightened sheep?
Foolish hearts! why will ye wander
From a love so true and deep?

2 Was there ever kinder shepherd
Half so gentle, half so sweet,
As the Saviour who would have us
Come and gather at His feet?

3 It is God: His love looks mighty,
But is mightier than it seems;
’Tis our Father: and His fondness
Goes far out beyond our dreams.

4 There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,
Like the wideness of the sea;
There’s a kindness in His justice,
Which is more than liberty.

5 There is no place where earth’s sorrows
Are more felt than up in Heaven;
There is no place where earth’s failings
Have such kindly judgment given.

6 There is welcome for the sinner,
And more graces for the good;
There is mercy with the Saviour;
There is healing in His blood.

7 There is grace enough for thousands
Of new worlds as great as this;
There is room for fresh creations
In that upper home of bliss.

8 For the love of God is broader
Than the measure of our mind;
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind.

9 But we make His love too narrow
By false limits of our own;
And we magnify His strictness
With a zeal He will not own.

10 There is plentiful redemption
In the blood that has been shed;
There is joy for all the members
In the sorrows of the Head.

11 ’Tis not all we owe to Jesus;
It is something more than all;
Greater good because of evil,
Larger mercy through the fall.

12 Pining souls, come nearer Jesus,
and O come not doubting thus,
but with faith that trusts more bravely
his great tenderness for us.

13 If our love were but more simple,
We should take Him at His word;
And our lives would be all sunshine
In the sweetness of our Lord.

Some hymn books print the lines as eight line verses (it depends what tune you want to use whether four line or eight line verses make sense). Some hymn books (including Hymns A and M) have the hymn with its original first verse (so it starts "souls of men why will ye scatter") while many others (including the EH and the NEH) omit the opening verses and start at "There's a wideness in God's mercy". Most hymn books give a maximum of 8 verses; only 7 in the NEH.

The New English Hymnal has also taken the trouble to include the last verse but to corrupt the words for us. Clearly they do not have a sweet tooth, or they think sweetness is bad for our teeth. Faber—doubtless dealing with his poor folk around the Oratory that he established in King William Street in London, and the local schools, for which he composed his hymns—was happy to provide a little beauty and sweetness in their lives. The editors of the New English Hymnal as always prefer to replace something striking with something tedious.

No sunshine, only gladness.

No sweetness, only joy.

Here is the ending of their hymn:

If our love were but more simple,
We should take Him at His word;
And our lives would be all gladness
In the joy of Christ our Lord.

Why not leave that verse out if you don't like what it says? After all there are plenty more to choose from!

Robin has some thoughts on the tune (prompted by Annie) which he may care to share with us. But meanwhile I thought I'd finish by adding an extract from The Guardian of July 14th 2003:

Whoever compiled the order of service for yesterday morning's Eucharist attended by members of the Church of England synod at York Minster - maybe it was "the Management", as senior churchmen tend to call Him Upstairs - clearly has a sense of humour.

The 580 lay, clergy and episcopal members of the synod, deeply divided this weekend over the aborted appointment of Canon Jeffrey John as the church's first openly gay bishop, found themselves singing in nearly perfect harmony the obscure 19th century hymn: There's a Wideness in God's Mercy, Like the Wideness of the Sea.

Its author, FW Faber, could never have realised the relevance his words would have,140 years after his death: "We make his love too narrow/By false limits of our own;/And we magnify his strictness/With a zeal he will not own .../If our love were but more simple/ We should take him at his word;/And our life would be all gladness/In the joy of Christ our Lord."

Well, evidently it wasn't Faber's hymn they were singing but the one in the NEH.

The real one, the one Faber wrote, perhaps is a bit obscure now. But the reason why it's obscure is mostly because it has been obscured by the very widespread use of the corrupt version...

Place holder

Apologies for the lackof a blog entry so far this week. The cause is partly Mothering Sunday duties, together with excessive pressure of work and not yet having located any information about "There's a wideness in God's mercy" (nor much information about the content of Mark's sermon).
Any reports from my readers of the gist of Mark's sermon would be most welcome.

Wrestling Tunes

I forgot to mention the tunes.

I've discovered tunes as follows that must have been specially written for this hymn:

Wrestling Jacob by SS Wesley at Public School Hymn book 363 tune 2

Peniel by Josiah Booth at Congregational Hymnal 400

Jabbok by Cyril V. Taylor at BBC hymn book hymn 4

I deduce from the names that all of these were designed to suit this hymn. Of the three I think Jabbok the best. The rest are boring.

To me, to all, thy bowels move (Thy nature and thy name is love)

Once again I missed the sermon this morning because I was catechising the children, but I gather that even after the sermon there's a lot more to be explored in the Wrestling Jacob hymn—indeed far more than could be covered in a sermon and probably more than I can put into a short blog commentary. I hope you'll agree (by the time we get to the end of today's entry) that it's not entirely surprising that two of our Lent preachers chose this hymn for their topic—and one of them had to be told to think of another one instead. Apparently Isaac Watts was quoted as saying that this single poem of Charles Wesley's, Wrestling Jacob, was worth all the verses he himself (Watts) had written. (Watts quoted by John Wesley, brother of Charles).


The topic for today, then: Come, O thou traveller unknown.

Words by Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems, 1742.

There are fourteen verses in the original poem. I shall append the whole lot complete at the end of this entry. Four were included in the English Hymnal, BBC Hymn Book and Songs of Praise, five in the New English Hymnal and Hymns A and M, six in the Public School Hymnal, seven in the Congregational Hymnal. Any advance on seven? I haven't found anything. So none of us has ever sung more than half of this hymn (actually I doubt most of us have ever sung more than about a third).

1 The background:

Genesis 32:24-32. Jacob trying to appease Esau his brother sends on his servants and kinsfolk ahead of him, south towards Seir, with gifts (what gifts! See Genesis 32.13). Jacob himself remains on the north side of the Jabbok river and spends the night there entirely alone.

Except that he is not alone.

He is visited by an unknown stranger who wrestles with him the whole night until the break of day.

Jacob struggles all night with the stranger and towards the break of day, the stranger, finding he is not winning the fight, touches Jacob's thigh and puts it out of joint.

Then there follows this exchange of conversation between Jacob and his mysterious companion:

Stranger: Let me go, for the day breaketh.
Jacob: I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.
Stranger: What is thy name?
Jacob: Jacob.
Stranger: Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.
Jacob: Tell me, I pray thee, thy name?
Stranger: Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name?

Then the stranger blesses Jacob and is gone. Jacob then gives a name to the place: "Peniel", says the author of Genesis, adjusting the name Penuel to get an etymology that has something to do with God's face. "For I have seen God face to face and my life is preserved," says Jacob, to explain the act of naming.

And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh (verse 31).

Even for the writer of Genesis we can see that the traditional motif of the struggle with a mythical beast or demon that will vanish at dawn, and the need to know his name in order to achieve power over him, has been transformed into an allegorical struggle with God. The need to know a person's name in order to have power over him has been transformed into the need to know a person's name in order to bless him. But the God of the Old Testament will not reveal his name. This is an uneven struggle in which one participant is in a position to give the blessing and the other is not.

The stranger does not stop to be blessed by Jacob, but he also implies that Jacob already knows who he is. He does not need to be told. "Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name?" says the stranger. The story reminds us of the disciples on the road to Emmaus: "did not out heart burn within us?" they ask when they recognise the Lord at the moment when he blesses the bread, and find that they have been debating the theology of the crucifixion with the man himself (Luke 24:32).

Jacob earns the title Israel (God persists) because he did not yield in the struggle, but endured to the break of day against a God who persists in testing him to the bitter end.

2 Charles Wesley's reflections

Wesley responds to the Jacob story with a reflection on the Christian struggle, perhaps his own in particular. It is said that John Wesley, Charles's brother, broke down in tears as he tried to expound this hymn shortly after Charles's death: he broke down at the third line "My company before is gone, and I am left alone with thee." We may assume that for John this line was not just about Charles's life-long lonely struggle with the God of love, but here John saw his own struggle too. His brother has been sent on before into the far country beyond the river, and now he is left to wrestle alone with the stranger god.

In our Christian life, we encounter a God who does not reveal his name or his nature. We struggle with him throughout our life—indeed the struggle seems to be a struggle to keep hold of him, to prevent him from slipping away from our grasp. It is the fear of being abandoned by God that haunts the Christian in this hymn, the fear of being alone. Time and again we are close to exhaustion, but even in exhaustion and despair we refuse to give up and let go. As we struggle we come to realise in our hearts who it is that we are engaged with, and the realisation yields peace and security at last.

Who is it? The answer is an inspirational Christian take on the Jacob story: the identity of that strange God can only be love. "Thy nature and thy name is love": this refrain features as the last line of each one of the last six verses. That is what we discover-- but we don't discover it because he tells us. We discover it because it dawns on us in the course of a life that is both compelling and demanding.

Finally we become fully aware of the truth of who it was we were engaged with as day breaks: day break in Wesley's poem is the moment of the dawning of truth. 'The morning breaks, the shadows flee, pure universal love thou art' (verse 9). To know the truth is to end the struggle, but not in failure or submission but in success, since the struggle was itself a struggle to find out the name and the nature of the object of one's encounter.

But then there is the lameness, the crippled thigh: God has lamed us in the struggle, and we are now wholly dependent upon God for strength (but joyful with it). "Contented now upon my thigh I halt, till life's short journey end; all helplessness, all weakness I on thee alone for strength depend."

3 Exegesis

Besides that brief summary of what I take to be the general purport of the poem, I now want to offer a small amount of detailed exegesis on particular bits that seem to me to be particularly fine or striking, verse by verse.

Verse 1

Come, O thou Traveller unknown,
Whom still I hold, but cannot see!
My company before is gone,
And I am left alone with Thee;
With Thee all night I mean to stay,
And wrestle till the break of day.

The speaker is, as it were, Jacob. "My company before is gone" refers to the occasion on which Jacob has sent his servants and family on ahead. "And he rose up that night and took his two wives, and his two womenservants, and his eleven sons, and passed over the ford Jabbok. And he took them, and sent them over the brook, and sent over that he had. And Jacob was left alone." Genesis 32:22-4.

The traveller unknown is the stranger who wrestles with Jacob all night "And there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day" Genesis 32.24.

Wesley picks up on the determination and persistence theme in Genesis: he announces his intention to persist in the struggle till dawn from the first: "With thee all night I mean to stay..."

Verse 2

I need not tell Thee who I am,
My misery and sin declare;
Thyself hast called me by my name,
Look on Thy hands, and read it there;
But who, I ask Thee, who art Thou?
Tell me Thy name, and tell me now.

The speaker (ourselves now) dissents from the Genesis version: in Jacob's case the stranger had to ask him his name.

Here, by contrast, God does not need to ask us who we are, nor what our name is.

For firstly our condition declares who we are in terms of nature: our nature is misery and sin.

And secondly our name was given by God himself. "Look on thy hands and read it there": God has our name written on his own hands, perhaps (I suppose) because he made us.

"But who, I ask thee, who art thou?" This introduces the real struggle: we want to find out about God. That is the task. It is not a struggle for God to come to know us, but it is a struggle for us to come to know God.


Verse 3

In vain Thou strugglest to get free,
I never will unloose my hold!
Art Thou the Man that died for me?
The secret of Thy love unfold;
Wrestling, I will not let Thee go,
Till I Thy name, Thy nature know.

The exclamation mark in line 2 is important to the dialogue. It's missing in the NEH.

Again the Jacob story and the Christian one are intertwined. Now it is the stranger who is trying to escape (but that is also hinted at in Jacob's story, for it is the stranger who says "Let me go for the day breaketh" and Jacob demands that he bless him first). Here Wesley envisages us demanding that Christ identify himself: we will not let him go until he has given up the secret of his love.

Art thou the Man that died for me? This has no counterpart in the Jacob story: it alerts us to the fact that we are reading Jacob's wrestling as our wrestling with the Christian faith. And it reminds us of those intimations in the Gospels (and in Christian mythology) that one may meet Christ in the most unlikely characters who turn up at our door unannounced, the poor and the outcasts. Here it is the stranger whose identity is both compelling and worrying. Who are you, stranger? Are you the man who died for me? I know and yet I don't know. I have to find out what the secret is.

Verse 4
Wilt Thou not yet to me reveal
Thy new, unutterable Name?
Tell me, I still beseech Thee, tell;
To know it now resolved I am;
Wrestling, I will not let Thee go,
Till I Thy Name, Thy nature know.

Verses 3, 4,and 5 all end "till I thy name, thy nature know". It is important to have the full set of verses at this stage of the poem, since the length of the struggle (a whole night or a whole lifetime) is measured by this repetitive exchange. The stranger never replies: he just wrestles endlessly to get free. The monologue is the Christian's struggle through the darkness and loneliness: struggling with a silent stranger who never replies. But the Christian never gives up: he demands and demands. He tells the stranger that he will not give up until he knows. It is the determination to continue and never to give in that is captured by these demanding verses. Tell me, I still beseech thee, tell!

"Thy new unutterable name" is crucial to the OT/NT parallel that is being set up. In the Old Testament God had an unutterable name ("I am", or words to that effect) and the unutterability or unknowability of his name is part of the theme in this passage of Genesis. Humans cannot know God's name, nor can they see his face and live. Jacob knows that he has been face to face with God well enough to name the place Peniel on account of it, but he does not discover the name.

But here instead the "new unutterable name" of God is his new testament name. That name is love, though he never tells us so.

Deus caritas est. That fact is for us to deduce. He will not tell us so.

And it is the name of the new covenant because Jesus gave us a new commandment, the commandment to love, on the night before he died. It is that new unutterable name that Wesley suggests we struggle to discover in the stranger who wrestles with us all night until dawn breaks.

Verse 5
’Tis all in vain to hold Thy tongue
Or touch the hollow of my thigh;
Though every sinew be unstrung,
Out of my arms Thou shalt not fly;
Wrestling I will not let Thee go
Till I Thy name, Thy nature know.

"Or touch the hollow of my thigh" alludes, of course, to Jacob's story, where the stranger puts Jacob's thigh out of joint and then the sinew shrivels up and he is lamed.
Wesley goes on "Though every sinew be unstrung..." In other words, he means to say, it is vain to try to overpower me and test my faith by physical trials. Even if every sinew were dislocated, I would still persist. The perseverance is endless. I will not let thee go, not whatever you do to me.

Verse 6
What though my shrinking flesh complain,
And murmur to contend so long?
I rise superior to my pain,
When I am weak, then I am strong
And when my all of strength shall fail,
I shall with the God-man prevail.

The theme of resisting depsite physical exhaustion continues in this and the following verse.

The shrinking flesh alludes to Jacob's thigh: "Therefore the children of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank, which is upon the thigh, unto this day: because he touched the hollow of Jacob's thigh in the sinew that shrank." (32:32).

Here the pain in the flesh is conceived as complaining and urging the man to stop the struggle, but he continues none the less. "I rise superior to my pain".

Indeed, he now sees that the more his strength fails the closer he is to winning the fight, and when all of his strength fails that is when he will prevail. In other words the destruction of physical strength is part and parcel of acquiring an understanding of the nature of love. There is no accidental connection between frailty in the body and strength in the understanding of God's love.

Verses 7-8
My strength is gone, my nature dies,
I sink beneath Thy weighty hand,
Faint to revive, and fall to rise;
I fall, and yet by faith I stand;
I stand and will not let Thee go
Till I Thy Name, Thy nature know.


Yield to me now, for I am weak,
But confident in self-despair;
Speak to my heart, in blessings speak,
Be conquered by my instant prayer;
Speak, or Thou never hence shalt move,
And tell me if Thy Name is Love.

These two verses complete the process of declining strength in the physical sense and increasing strength in faith.

In verse 7 we get the first hint that faith is what keeps him going as he becomes totally weakened in bodily strength: "I fall and yet by faith I stand". He is still clinging on, but not by any physical strength now.

In verse 8 he no longer has any self-confidence. He is confident in self-despair: that is he is confident precisely because he has given up hope in himself.

Notice that the punctuation of this line is correct here, without a comma, and not in the NEH ("but confident, in self despair").

This is the move that relinquishes self altogether. It is not by confidence in oneself that one will discover the truth about God. And notice that by the end of this verse he is able to suggest what the name is: no longer does he ask what the name is; now he asks whether the name is Love. The suggestion comes from himself, not from the silent stranger. And now is the moment of truth dawning:

Verse 9
’Tis Love! ’tis Love! Thou diedst for me!
I hear Thy whisper in my heart;
The morning breaks, the shadows flee,
Pure, universal love Thou art;
To me, to all, Thy bowels move;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.

Here he discovers the answer. This is the end of the long dark night of struggling.

"To me, to all, thy bowels move". All hymn books that include this verse rewrite this line. The options are to replace bowels with mercies (NEH and most others) or "heart" (Public School Hymn Book). Of the two "heart" is clearly much better. The bowels are the bowels of compassion, because traditionally love and tender feelings were placed in the lower intestines, whereas the heart was the location of the intellect. This is the Aristotelian anatomy, and was normal into the Middle Ages; but it has since been replaced by a more modern anatomy in which the intellect is placed in the head and the tender feelings are placed in the heart.

So to have one's bowels move is to be moved by emotion, to love. That is fine (we do use the idea of being moved by something in just this way). But there's a problem with simply replacing bowels with "heart" to cope with the fact that we no longer think we love with outr bowels, because we don't normally speak of our heart moving ("To me, to all, thy heart doth move" is not obviously meaningful). But then nor does it mean anything to say "To me, to all, thy mercies move", since the whole point was to express an exclamation of having discovered that God feels love towards me and towards all.


I don't see an easy answer to this, except to learn to read the text as it should be read, as referring to the bowels of compassion, and to learn to read that word as a term for the emotions, in just the way that we use "guts" to refer to courage, and yet find no difficulty in also speaking (in other contexts) of our guts as the location of various unpleasant bodily functions.

Verses 10-14
My prayer hath power with God; the grace
Unspeakable I now receive;
Through faith I see Thee face to face,
I see Thee face to face, and live!
In vain I have not wept and strove;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.

I know Thee, Savior, who Thou art.
Jesus, the feeble sinner’s friend;
Nor wilt Thou with the night depart.
But stay and love me to the end,
Thy mercies never shall remove;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.

The Sun of righteousness on me
Hath rose with healing in His wings,
Withered my nature’s strength; from Thee
My soul its life and succor brings;
My help is all laid up above;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.

Contented now upon my thigh
I halt, till life’s short journey end;
All helplessness, all weakness I
On Thee alone for strength depend;
Nor have I power from Thee to move:
Thy nature, and Thy name is Love.

Lame as I am, I take the prey,
Hell, earth, and sin, with ease o’ercome;
I leap for joy, pursue my way,
And as a bounding hart fly home,
Through all eternity to prove
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.

These four verses are usually omitted by the hymnals. They are important because they express the joy and the weakness combined. The Christian is completely drained of physical strength. He "halts upon his thigh" (an allusion to Jacob who "halted upon his thigh" 32:31). He can't actually move away, he is now dependent upon God. But notice the repetitive refrains of discovery: Thy nature and thy name is love. For this discovery, achieved in a long dark night of loneliness, he now leaps for joy.

Wesley also rejects the implication (in Jacob's story) that the stranger leaves him alone again in the morning.

No.

For Wesley what we discover is that we are not alone: we remain unable to move away because we are now reliant on God for strength. And God no longer tries to escape from our grasp.

Wesley also invites us to approach death with enthusiasm. "And as a bounding hart fly home". Of course this longing for death ("till life's short journey end" implies that one is nearly there by this stage) is not much to the taste of modern hymn books, so we wouldn't expect to find them offering us any of the joyful attitude with which this hymn concludes.

But notice the reminiscences in verse 12 of Wesley's own hymn Hark the Herald Angels sing: "Hail the sun of righteousness, risen with healing in his wings". Here it is personalised: The sun of righteousness on me hath rose with healing in his wings.

So the birth of Christ is located here in the discovery of the name and nature of that unknown traveller with whom we wrestle in our inner being.

4 The words

Here are the full words unspoiled:


Come, O thou Traveler unknown,
Whom still I hold, but cannot see!
My company before is gone,
And I am left alone with Thee;
With Thee all night I mean to stay,
And wrestle till the break of day.

I need not tell Thee who I am,
My misery and sin declare;
Thyself hast called me by my name,
Look on Thy hands, and read it there;
But who, I ask Thee, who art Thou?
Tell me Thy name, and tell me now.

In vain Thou strugglest to get free,
I never will unloose my hold!
Art Thou the Man that died for me?
The secret of Thy love unfold;
Wrestling, I will not let Thee go,
Till I Thy name, Thy nature know.

Wilt Thou not yet to me reveal
Thy new, unutterable Name?
Tell me, I still beseech Thee, tell;
To know it now resolved I am;
Wrestling, I will not let Thee go,
Till I Thy Name, Thy nature know.

’Tis all in vain to hold Thy tongue
Or touch the hollow of my thigh;
Though every sinew be unstrung,
Out of my arms Thou shalt not fly;
Wrestling I will not let Thee go
Till I Thy name, Thy nature know.

What though my shrinking flesh complain,
And murmur to contend so long?
I rise superior to my pain,
When I am weak, then I am strong
And when my all of strength shall fail,
I shall with the God-man prevail.

My strength is gone, my nature dies,
I sink beneath Thy weighty hand,
Faint to revive, and fall to rise;
I fall, and yet by faith I stand;
I stand and will not let Thee go
Till I Thy Name, Thy nature know.

Yield to me now, for I am weak,
But confident in self-despair;
Speak to my heart, in blessings speak,
Be conquered by my instant prayer;
Speak, or Thou never hence shalt move,
And tell me if Thy Name is Love.

’Tis Love! ’tis Love! Thou diedst for me!
I hear Thy whisper in my heart;
The morning breaks, the shadows flee,
Pure, universal love Thou art;
To me, to all, Thy bowels move;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.

My prayer hath power with God; the grace
Unspeakable I now receive;
Through faith I see Thee face to face,
I see Thee face to face, and live!
In vain I have not wept and strove;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.

I know Thee, Savior, who Thou art.
Jesus, the feeble sinner’s friend;
Nor wilt Thou with the night depart.
But stay and love me to the end,
Thy mercies never shall remove;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.

The Sun of righteousness on me
Hath rose with healing in His wings,
Withered my nature’s strength; from Thee
My soul its life and succor brings;
My help is all laid up above;
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.

Contented now upon my thigh
I halt, till life’s short journey end;
All helplessness, all weakness I
On Thee alone for strength depend;
Nor have I power from Thee to move:
Thy nature, and Thy name is Love.

Lame as I am, I take the prey,
Hell, earth, and sin, with ease o’ercome;
I leap for joy, pursue my way,
And as a bounding hart fly home,
Through all eternity to prove
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.

Acknowledgements to the Cyberhymnal web site for information without which this Blog entry would have been impossible.

All my hope on God is founded

Unfortunately I missed the sermon on this hymn today (and I missed singing the hymn) because I was instructing the children in the parish room. So forgive me if what I say here betrays ignorance of what was said in the pulpit.

There's nothing wrong with this hymn in the New English Hymnal (thankfully) but in the absence of any horrors to report about that book today I thought I might say a bit about verse 2 of All my hope, and request information from those who have access to bad hymn books that bowdlerise that verse. I know that I've been to places where the words are badly mangled.

The hymn is by Robert Bridges (published 1899), inspired by, but by no means translating, Meine Hoffnung stehet feste by Joachim Neander.

One thing that clearly causes confusion is this (in verse 2):

Pride of man and earthly glory,
Sword and crown betray his trust;
What with care and toil he buildeth,
Tower and temple fall to dust.

Now who are the 'he' and the 'his' in this verse?

In the first verse "he" was God (He doth still my trust renew... through change and chance He guideth...He alone calls my heart to be His own).

Some hymnals (including those on the internet: those are the only examples I've found, but as I say I don't have immediate access to the likely culprits such as Hymns Old and New or Mission Praise)--some hymnals, as I say, put in some capital letters to help us to see whether 'he' refers to God or not at various places in this hymn. Well that's all fine and helpful, or it would be, if they didn't put a capital H on both 'his' and 'he' in this verse.

But alas they do.

And that's plainly wrong.

"What with care and toil he buildeth" clearly refers to man: it's man who builds towers and temples with toil and care, and then they fall to dust. In contrast to that, says Bridges, "God's power, hour by hour, is my temple and my tower." Introducing that with "But" shows that this is in contrast to the towers and temples that others put such effort into.

So we should understand that the efforts of human beings are worthless when they build temples that are destined to fall to dust (unlike the temple that is God's power). "He", then, in that sentence should not have a capital H, for it is not God who puts care and toil into building towers, is it?

(I suppose there's another interpretation that says that we men are the temple that God builds with care and then (to his disappointment) we fall to dust--but surely that is far too hopeless a picture of God's powerlessness to save, and anyway it's betrayed as false by the reference to God by name in "But God's power..." which shows that we were not talking about God in the previous sentence. ----Previous sentence it would be if the NEH had a full stop there, as is required by the sense.)

What about the previous "his" in line 2 of verse 2? "Sword and crown betray his trust." Should that have a capital H (or be rewritten as "betray God's trust": I've seen that somewhere)? Let's think about it.

If we read that as God's trust, then we are saying that the human endeavours in which we take earthly pride, including warfare and political power (sword and crown) betray God's trust in us. We have to understand that there is something we are trusted to do by God, and all those actions of ours let him down. What is that? I see no indication that there is any mention of God trusting us. Rather the hymn is about us trusting God.

Better then to read "betray his trust" to mean "betray man's trust". That is, we put our trust in earthly glory, in princes and armies, in things that we think won't let us down or will save us from trouble. But all these things betray our trust. Our towers and temples fall to dust. It is our trust that is betrayed not God's, but if we trust in God, he will not let us down. This then makes clear sense of why the next "he" is also man.

What's more it's obvious that this has to be the sense if we look at the passage of I Timothy 6.17 from which Neander, and thence Bridges, got his inspiration. This is what he is paraphrasing: "As for the rich in this world, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on uncertain riches but on God who richly furnishes us with everything to enjoy."

So the thought is "Don't rely on the powers that be here, but on the power of God, because the powers that be here on earth let you down, but God doesn't".

So there should be no capital letter on 'he' or 'his'. Both refer to man, not God.

As for the version of this hymn that you can find at http://www.hos3.com/hos3/archives/2005/12/219r_all_my_hop.html, aaaagh!

Forty Days and Forty Nights

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS ENTRY IS PARTLY WRONG, BECAUSE I USED A BAD SOURCE FOR SMYTTAN'S ORIGINAL WORDS. I HOPE TO REVISE THE ENTRY AND REISSUE IT AS A SECOND EDITION AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

The first sunday in Lent wouldn't be the first sunday in Lent if we didn't have Forty days and forty nights on the hymn list. And this year, being the year of Mark in the Lectionary, it fits quite well, with its emphasis on Christ's superhuman fasting and endurance during his period in the Wilderness, rather than on the more human side of the temptations that we were looking at in connection with Lead Us Heavenly Father Lead Us (see above, January 15th).

The hymn that we know and love is a composite created originally for Hymns A&M in its first edition (1861). It is partly based on some verses by G.H. Smyttan (1822-70) but heavily altered by Francis Pott (1832-1909). Smyttan published his verses in the Penny Post in 1856, but it's hard to discover exactly what he wrote, and what has been re-written by others. Several of the hymnals on the Web claim to be giving us words by Smyttan, but they actually give us words that are identical to the ones we know, revised by Pott. By contrast, the only one I've found that appears to have Smyttan's original words for verse 3 is a powerpoint file of the hymn downloadable at familyfriendlychurches.org.uk/midihymns/HP130.ppt. But that claims, rather oddly, that the words it gives are by Smyttan and Pott.

Verse 3 is clearly the one that everyone thinks they must have a go at improving.

Here's what I believe Smyttan wrote for verse 3:

Shall not we thy sorrow share,
Learn thy discipline of will,
And, like thee, by fast and prayer
Wrestle with the powers of ill?

There's actually not much wrong with that. It seems to express something of the idea that the lenten discipline is to be modelled on a discipline that was meaningful to Christ himself, in a life in which fasting and prayer were part and parcel of a struggle against evil. Perhaps the phrase "the powers of ill" is not awfully felicitous, but the point it is making is a good one.

Francis Pott offered a re-write of that verse as follows:

Shall not we thy sorrow share,
And from earthly joys abstain,
Fasting with unceasing prayer,
Glad with thee to suffer pain?

In the English Hymnal 'sorrow' in the first line of that Pott verse has become 'watchings', and in many hymnals 'sorrow' has become 'sorrows'. In one or other of those variants, this is the verse that most of us habitually sing, if we were brought up on Hymns A&M, the English Hymnal, the Public School Hymn Book or whatever.

Theologically, I think it has to be said that the verse by Pott is less good, than the verse by Smyttan. There is no indication of why we should want to engage in these kinds of abstinence and pain (other than solidarity with the apparently pointless sufferings Jesus was undergoing at the time). There is no hint that it might be part of a programme of wrestling against the powers of evil. So in that sense it does appear just to glorify the fun of pain for the sake of pain, and abstinence from earthly joys as if there was something obviously wrong with them.

But as poetry I think there is much to be said for Pott's verse, especially in the version with 'watchings' that appeared in the English Hymnal. The first line has a pleasing pair of alliterations on the sh and w sounds ("Shall not we thy watchings share"). The juxtaposition of the rejection of earthly joys in line 2 and with the notion of taking up pains gladly in the last line, which points up the contrast between the apparent joys of earthly things and the real joys of spiritual commitment, is nicely done; indeed the very oxymoronic structure of the last line, starting with 'glad' and ending with 'pain' is a treat. And the third line, "fasting with unceasing prayer", is neat and comfortable: it fits the metre and rhyme scheme smoothly and without any grammatical awkwardness.

The New English Hymnal follows Songs of Praise in rejecting both Pott's re-write, and Smyttan's original for verse 3, and susbstituting instead something that was created by Percy Dearmer (though the NEH doesn't admit that). For the last appearance of Percy Dearmer in this Blog see above, 12th February. Actually probably the NEH is right not to name Dearmer, but just to put in a double dagger, because they can't even bring themselves to leave that version alone either.

Here's what Dearmer wrote for verse 3:

Let us thy endurance share
And from earthly greed abstain,
With thee watching unto prayer,
With thee strong to suffer pain.

Here we are not glad to suffer pain with Jesus, but rather strong to suffer our own pain perhaps (and do I sense that we get our strength from him, rather than trying to be strong for him?).

We do not abstain from earthly joys but from earthly greed, which is presumably an excessive desire for earthly pleasures. So this is not asceticism or lenten fasting but merely standard virtue, not being greedy. I think that rather reduces the significance of Jesus's fasting in the wilderness: it was perhaps more than just a rejection of greed, no?

And the watchings or sorrows have gone, and have become 'endurance' instead. So again there is less active engagement in extra disciplines— we are not so much invited to share in Jesus's expedition into the wilderness but rather to see our everyday lives as providing opportunities for endurance of suffering and pain (though this is slightly modified by the idea of watching unto prayer in line 3).

And notice the hiatus in the first line of Dearmer's verse: "thy endurance" is not easy to sing without ending up with a word that seems to be "yendurance".

The editors of the NEH have chosen Dearmer's verse, which seems to me, of the three the worst both poetically and theologically. However, they have eliminated the hiatus in the first line by changing 'thy' to 'thine'.
They've also got rid of the greed and put back the joys by changing line 2 to say "And awhile from joys abstain". But that's a disaster too because surely it isn't all joys we abstain from (after all, as Pott had taught us to sing, we are glad and take pleasure in the spiritual endeavours that we can share with Christ). So we needed that 'earthly joys' phrase because it showed that we are not miserable people and kill-joys—we are just checking ourselves and re-orienting ourselves to the real joys, the joys of being a disciple and taking upon ourselves the discipline that goes with that.

Those thoughts, about the worthless joys that we give up and the worthwhile joys that we obtain thereby, were put into this hymn by Francis Pott. They were not the work of Smyttan (it seems, if I've reconstructed this correctly). But they do have something to tell us about the meaning of the lenten fast. But do I detect in the NEH editors' preference for the verse by Dearmer some kind of inability to understand either the poetry of Pott's version, or its delight in ascetic commitment?

Do they perhaps think that abstaining from joy is what it's all about?

How sad! No wonder they think we only want to do it for a while.


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