In Christ there is no East or West

"In Christ there is no East or West" is one of the hymns that was not included in the English Hymnal but has made an entrance into the New English Hymnal, having become popular by way of Songs of Praise, Hymns A & M New Standard, and a few other twentieth century books. Or at least a bit of it has got into the New English Hymnal, mutilated but not quite so badly mutilated as in some other books.
As far as I can see, the full and unadulterated version of this hymn appears only in two books that I can find, and they are Songs of Praise (number 537) and The New Catholic Hymnal (no 104). I don't have the Celebration Hymnal to hand, so that may also be in good order. Oddly (and very unusually) the words given in the online hymnals (Cyberhymnal and Oremus hymnal) are corrupted (adjusted for inclusive language, it seems) in both cases.

Here is the original wording, or at least what I believe to be the original wording.

1 In Christ there is no East or West,
In Him no South or North;
But one great fellowship of love
Throughout the whole wide earth.

2 In Him shall true hearts everywhere
Their high communion find;
His service is the golden cord,
Close binding all mankind.

3 Join hands, then, brothers of the faith,
Whate'er your race may be!
Who serves my Father as a son
Is surely kin to me.

4 In Christ now meet both East and West,
In Him meet South and North;
All Christly souls are one in Him
Throughout the whole wide earth.

The words are attributed to John Oxenham (1852-1941), but actually that was a pseudonym. The author's real name was William Arthur Dunkerley, who was, besides being John Oxenham, also a deacon of Ealing Congregational Church (at least so my reference book, A Hymn Companion by Frank Colquhoun, tells me, though the Times obituary of Jan 25th 1941 kindly sent to me by James Yardley makes no reference to that, but only to the fact that he was a reluctant business man). He was best known for a number of novels published under the Oxenham name.

Now this hymn has suffered one almost universal intervention in hymn books both older and more recent. That is, in all cases other than Songs of Praise and the New Catholic Hymnal the word "Christly" in the last verse has been replaced with "Christlike". I can't quite think why anyone would feel the need to do this. It isn't as if Oxenham aka Dunkerley couldn't have chosen to write "Christlike" if he'd wanted to. Why did he write "Christly" then? Well, surely because it's a lot better in terms of poetic feel and more singable, I presume. And also, doesn't it mean something slightly more subtle, something slightly stronger than mere likeness to Christ? So what's the problem with it? Surely not that we find it hard to understand...

The NEH, like the rest, is guilty of that intervention, and it is doubtless for that that Oxenham gets a dagger by his name. What the NEH is unique in doing is mutilating the hymn by removing verse 2. If you use the NEH you get only a three-verse hymn; and to my mind the verse that has gone is the most interesting one.

The damage in other hymn books is worse however. There has been a great deal of enthusiasm for political correctness and inclusive language, resulting in a great rash of interventions by bad poets and editors, with respect to verse 3 in particular. Doubtless someone will be able to tell me what it says in Hymns Old and New (a book I do not allow in the house). The versions on Cyberhymnal and Oremus Hymnal are evidently infected by this habit: in Cyberhymnal we have

Join hands, then, members of the faith,

while Oremus Hymnal has

Join hands, disciples of the faith,

and James tells me that Church Hymnary 4 has

Come, brothers, sisters of the faith.

Meanwhile at the end of that verse, Oremus Hymnal keeps "Who serves my father as a son is surely kin to me" (though having lost the 'brothers' at the start of the verse, the point of this is a bit lost) but Cyberhymnal has

Who serves my father as his child is surely kin to me

but again, what is the point of saying that fellow children are kin to me, if you didn't call them brothers at the start of the verse?

Church Hymnary 4 has seen that problem, evidently, and kept the siblings in the first line of that verse, but then, strangely, loses it loses them in the third line by omitting the notion of sons and children at that point! It has

Whoever does my Father's will...

Notice that this also manages to lose the notion of service into the bargain, with the result that it fails to mark the connection with verse 2 (his service is the golden cord).

The other point that gets the more extreme "inclusive language freaks" worked up is the idea of "mankind" in "close binding all mankind". In Church Hymnary 4 and the Cyberhymnal this has become "Close binding humankind".

Now it seems to me that you might think that the whole sentiment of the hymn is inclusive, and anyone ought to be able to see that "all mankind" means all kinds of people, and that what makes us kin is service of the Father, not anything about our gender, race or anything else. So it does seem to me that there's absolutely no whiff of any kind of political incorrectness in the gendered language, and therefore there's no point in trying to doctor it. If it can't be misunderstood, surely it's a positively good role model for how to read poetry in the right spirit and not get hung up on the idea that a word always means the same in every context. Grrr.

Many thanks to James Yardley for his assistance with the research for this post.

Angel harps for ever ringing rest not day nor night

This is the second line of the hymn by Francis Potts that begins "Angel voices ever singing round thy throne of light."

Robin pointed out the day before yesterday that although angel voices sing, it doesn't seem that harps ring. The bells in heaven ring, that's for sure. But do harps ring?

This hymn calls for some emendation. My proposal is "Angel harps for ever pinging..."

Annie says harps don't ping either, but I think they do.

Children of the Heavenly King

I have fond memories of the hymn "Children of the Heavenly King".

I first learnt it at LSM in the days when we still had the English Hymnal and sang real hymns as they should be sung. It's a wonderful hymn for singing on journeys, and it particularly takes me back to a rather peculiar holiday we had in Cornwall with Rowan Williams and Jane and their baby Rhiannon. They had a car, we didn't; so we all piled in together like sardines into the Williams's not-very-big yellow car; in those days you didn't have to have seat belts or car seats for children. And then, once we were in, we had to sing hymns constantly because that was the only thing that could prevent our Annie, then 3 years old, from being travel sick within minutes of getting on the road.

"As ye journey sweetly sing" we all yelled, four adults two children and a baby, squeezed in with the windows shut to keep out the howling wind and rain of the most miserable week in a miserable early spring. "Jesus Christ your father's son bids you undismayed go on."

People might be forgiven for thinking that we still sing that hymn at Little St Mary's, and that we sang it this morning. But they would be sadly wrong.

We did sing the first two verses as John Cennick wrote them, and also his fourth (out of five). But the point of the hymn lies in the last verse of the hymn, which begins "Lord obediently we go...". That verse has quietly gone from the New English Hymnal.

John Cennick (1718-55), who wrote the real hymn, including its last verse and several others that we don't usually sing, was a Methodist lay preacher, friend of the Wesleys. Besides 'Children of the heavenly king', he also composed a rather less successful poem that began

Lo he cometh, countless trumpets
blow before his bloody sign!
Midst ten thousand saints and angels
see the crucified shine.
Alleluia!
Welcome, welcome bleeding lamb!

It was Charles Wesley who, in 1758, turned that unpromising start into a great Advent hymn (Lo he comes with clouds descending...).

Perhaps the editors of the New English Hymnal thought that because Wesley could improve upon Cennick then they, a committee of uninspired twentieth century Anglicans with little poetry but a great many sociological prejudices, must be able to do so too.

This is what they did.

They cut out the last verse, and put in, in its place, a piece of sexist doggerel based loosely on the fifth verse of Cennick's original (which the English Hymnal editors had wisely omitted—for they too evidently thought that Cennick could be saved from some of his worst errors of judgement). This is what Cennick wrote at verse 5:

Lift your eyes, ye sons of light,
Zion’s city is in sight:
There our endless home shall be,
There our Lord we soon shall see.

The editors of the New English Hymnal have come up with the following adaptation of that verse (in lieu of the last verse):

Lift your eyes ye sons of light
Sion's city is in sight;
There our endless home shall be,
There our Lord in glory see.

You might have a sense that the grammar and syntax of the last two lines don't work.

You'd be quite right.

There's no subject for the verb 'see' in the last line . To make it right, you'd need a 'we shall' somewhere in the sentence: "There our Lord in glory we'll see", but of course that won't scan. Cennick had "we soon shall see" which works perfectly well. You could get away with having the 'we' in the previous line (There our endless home we'll see, there our Lord in glory see) but of course you don't want 'see' twice, and, as it is, the subject in line 3 is 'our endless home' not 'we' so that can't serve as the subject of 'see' (unless our endless home is what sees, which I don't think is intended).

So the last two lines as written in the NEH are nonsense. That's odd because when Cennick wrote the verse, the last two lines made perfect, if somewhat uninspired, grammatical sense. As we saw, he wrote "There our endless home shall be, There our Lord we soon shall see." There's no problem with that.

So the NEH editors have garbled the syntax in order to replace "we soon shall see" with "in glory see." We'll come back to why they might want to do that in a minute.

What about lines 1 and 2 of that verse? Those are (alas) unadulterated Cennick, though he didn't put them at the very end of the poem as the editors have mysteriously chosen to do. Sadly they are not among Cennick's most lucid lines. Notice that the 'children' that we had in the first verse have now become 'sons'. OK, so we've always been happy to sing 'Fear not, brethren' in verse 6 (which we know as verse 3), for though "brethren" is officially masculine, it's a warmly inclusive term and women brethren are usually happy to be included. But 'sons' is less comfortable: it seems gratuitously exclusive, for men only. What's more, 'sons of light' is not really a very clear idea. I think we know why we believe ourselves to be (by adoption) children of the heavenly king, but I'm not sure on what basis we think we're 'sons of light'. And why are the first two lines of this verse in the second person plural while the last two are in the first person plural? Who's speaking to whom? Part of the problem with the lack of a 'we' in the last line is due to the fact that the verse started by talking about 'you' and then suddenly switched to 'us'. That would be bad enough as Cennick originally wrote it, but by the time the editors have intervened as well, we now have the impossible situation in which the verse has to change the subject from "you" to "us" without ever mentioning 'us'.

So really, the more you think about it, the more it seems that the English Hymnal was wise to omit that verse.

So why did the NEH committee think they needed to bring it back, and rewrite it to boot?

You'd think, wouldn't you, that there must have been something really awful and non-pc about the last verse of Cennick's original, if it's to be amputated in favour of this piece of drivel. For what heinous sin did the NEH thought-police see fit to garble it so?

Here's the last verse that belongs in that place (this one I shall have at my funeral, please):

Lord, obediently we go,
Gladly leaving all below:
Only thou our leader be
And we still will follow thee.

It's about our readiness to follow Christ, without heed for the things of this world, and our readiness to die, gladly, as followers of Jesus. With this verse in place we can see that there is an overall pattern to the hymn: the first verse addresses us "Children... as ye journey, sweetly sing!"; in the second verse we reply "We are travelling home..."; two other verses in the original intervene at this point in which the speaker addresses the children again, before the one which begins "lift your eyes ye sons of light" which we've just looked at. Then in the penultimate verse again the speaker addresses us "Fear not brethren...Jesus Christ your father's son bids you undismayed go on..."; and in the last verse we reply again.

We reply "Lord..." because it is Our Lord who bids us have courage as we stand on the borders of this world and prepare to go on to the next world, as our fathers went before. For, as the penultimate verse insists, "Jesus Christ, your father's son, bids you undismayed go on".

Now it is in response to that bidding that we say "obediently we go".

Jesus bids us go. We go, obediently, gladly.

What exactly is wrong with this? It's evidently not a problem of exclusive language since the editors have replaced a perfectly inclusive verse with an exclusive one.

So is there a theological problem?

Perhaps we're not supposed to be glad to leave the world below?

That seems a possible twentieth century hang up: asceticism and other worldliness weren't perhaps very fashionable in the eighties? But there's hardly anything very negative about readily leaving our earthly attachments when called away by God. After all, I presume that we sang the hymn today precisely because the Gospel reading was about leaving everything without a thought and not looking back when we hear the call to follow. So it's ironic that the relevant verse has been taken out.

Another possibility is that they have a worry about going gladly to death. This could explain the otherwise mystifying attempt to change the words of the verse we discussed above, the one that begins "Lift your eyes". Why did they so desperately want to get rid of "There our Lord we soon shall see" and replace it with "in glory see". Is it because the former suggests (correctly) that we, as believers and followers of Christ, look forward to death being before long, and greet it with some eagerness? That's not fashionable perhaps, living one's life as a preparation for something greater to come, and genuinely affirming the relative unimportance of physical death.

Or is it the idea of obedience? I must say, I rather suspect that the editors do have a sociological horror of obedience. We've already noticed that they bowdlerised 'Once in Royal David's City' to eliminate the idea that children might be supposed to be obedient. It seems clear that the NEH editors don't believe that obedience is a virtue, they don't think that Jesus's obedience to his parents is a proper model for our children, and they don't think it's appropriate for us to obey God when he calls us home.

Why not?

Do I detect, perhaps, a hint of the idea that it would be patronising for God to ask for obedience? The editors want to think that God treats us as grown ups, capable of acting autonomously, not under instructions. They think it is patronising of God to expect us to do things because he tells us. So obedience is a no-no word.

"Patronising." A word we use when we mean that we consider ourselves superior and the person who had the presumption to talk down to us was not (as he/she thought) actually as superior as she or he supposed. It is a word used only by the proud, those too proud to take advice, or to consider that others might have something to say to them. If we use it of God, it is because we are too proud to respond to the Lord's gentle bidding and his words of comfort to the dying.

If I'm right that this is why we don't like obedience any more, then it surely correlates with the attitude of a society that cannot accept death, cannot hear the call to go home singing for joy, and would rather shut its ears to that call and pretend it knows better; a society that seeks everything possible to usurp God's right to call us to die.

That's a sick society, and one that has lost its faith in God.

Boo for pride and hurrah for obedience, I say.

Who is this so weak and helpless?

A while back I did a post on "Who is this with garments gory" wherein I promised to say something about the hymn whose first line is in the title of this post. Here I am, and here I am going to say something.

"Who is this so weak and helpless" is a hymn by Bishop William Walsham How 1823-97. Now I've got nothing against Bishop W. W. How, but he does bear responsibility for a number of fairly awful hymns. Not all of them are awful: his best seems to be "For all the Saints who from their labours rest" and we certainly wouldn't want to live without that. Another good one (I think) is "It is a thing most wonderful" (at least that is good if it's sung to Herongate as in the English Hymnal and New English Hymnal: it has some other terrible tune in Mission Praise, I recall, which turns it into a trite hymn). But alas the other six hymns by How in the English Hymnal are rather less than great (surprisingly, the NEH has kept five out of the eight).

"Who is this so weak and helpless?" was written in 1867. That's 23 years after Coxe wrote "Who is this with garments gory?" and one can't help thinking that there's some intertextuality here. Both hymns are in the same metre and both begin "who is this..." But Coxe's (as we saw) is rich in complex biblical symbolism. How's, by contrast, is rather uninspired. I mean, it's true that How has picked up on the idea that we can't easily recognise the Godhead in the strange and rather powerless circumstances of Jesus's birth and life and death: that's the theme of the hymn. But it lacks the spectacle, and the density of imagery of Coxe's reflections on the one who trod the winepress all alone.

William How constructs his hymn by starting each verse with four lines describing something in the life of Jesus (first his birth, then his homeless wandering, then his trial and passion, then his crucifixion). Then in the second half of each verse, beginning in each case "'Tis the Lord" vel sim, he tells us that this is really God himself (despite appearances), and goes on to say something about the divine power that is so far from apparent in the scene just described. As you will see, the last four lines of each verse are really quite bad:

Who is this so weak and helpless,
Child of lowly Hebrew maid,
rudely in a stable sheltered,
coldly in a manger laid?
'Tis the Lord of all creation,
who this wondrous path hath trod;
he is God from everlasting,
and to everlasting God.

Who is this, a Man of sorrows,
walking sadly life's hard way,
homeless, weary, sighing, weeping,
over sin and Satan's sway?
'Tis our God, our glorious Saviour,
who above the starry sky
now for us a place prepareth,
where no tear can dim the eye.

Who is this? Behold him raining
drops of blood upon the ground!
Who is this, despised, rejected,
mocked, insulted, beaten, bound?
'Tis our God, who gifts and graces
on his Church now poureth down;
who shall smite in holy vengeance
all his foes beneath his throne.

Who is this that hangeth dying
with the thieves on either side?
Nails his hands and feet are tearing,
and the spear hath pierced his side.
'Tis the God who ever liveth,
'mid the shining ones on high,
in the glorious golden city,
reigning everlastingly.

If you think this isn't bad, just look at the rhymes...

Why did this unimaginative string of doggerel survive into the New English Hymnal, while its better predecessor didn't? One may well wonder.

One telling fact is that in the NEH this hymn is set to Ebenezer or Tôn-y-Botel, that fantastic Welsh hymn tune of 1890 that we've talked about before, which used to be set for "Who is this with garments gory" (whereas "Who is this so weak and helpless" had another Welsh tune called Llansannan, or, in other books, Eifionydd).

It makes you wonder whether the EDITORS still wanted to keep that great tune Ebenezer, but had some prejudice against that great hymn, so they put in this weak hymn instead, thinking we'd feel it was similar, or maybe we wouldn't even notice the difference, since it begins with the same words. Certainly it seems that must be what happened at Little St Mary's, where this hymn was set this year for evensong on Palm Sunday, as a sort of lame substitute for the wine-treading hymn that used to belong there.

I wonder what hymn Ebenezer was written for? In 1890 it could have been written for either of these things, but perhaps it was for a Welsh hymn we don't know. I'm beginning to regret that I didn't buy the Welsh Hymn book I found last summer in Hay on Wye (was it Hay on Wye? Can't recall now). It might have settled this question.

O lux beata Trinitas

Last Sunday I was a bit surprised to find that the office hymn set for Evensong was O Lux beata Trinitas (O Trinity of Blessed Light). It appears in the New English Hymnal as the office hymn for the period from Epiphany to Lent. This struck me as odd, since I felt sure that we used to sing it in the summer, in Trinity season; but the book said so, so I didn't complain.

I was also troubled to see that four verses were given in The New English Hymnal, not the three that I knew from of old, and that the hymn was said to be "From the Latin, translated by J.M. Neale 1818-66 and EDITORS". It was unclear whether that meant that the Editors had done some more translating from the Latin, or that they had done some more writing.

Well, I'm sure you've guessed. They'd done some more writing...

And they say "From the Latin" perhaps because they hadn't the heart to say that the original, from which they had borrowed some words and ideas, had once been by St Ambrose, that it was originally written in the fourth century A.D. and that it had been loved and preserved, and sung by generations of devout believers, for sixteen pious centuries before they saw fit to mess it up.

But wait. First, before we take a look at that, we need to do some detective work to settle the question what season this hymn should be proper to. Is it really the office hymn for Sunday evenings from Epiphany to Lent as the NEH suggests? Is it really the office hymn for Saturdays from Trinity Sunday to Advent, as the English Hymnal suggests? Or is it neither?

This is what we learn from the website Thesaurus Precum Latinarum
"This hymn is ascribed to St. Ambrose (340-397) and is used for Sunday Vespers for the second and fourth weeks of the Psalter in the Liturgy of the Hours. The hymn appears in the Roman Breviary under the title of Iam sol recedit igneus, where it is the Vespers hymn for the ferial office on Saturdays and Trinity Sunday."

Now I'm not entirely sure I understand that. It seems to me that the ferial office on Saturdays means Saturdays that are not a feast day and not in any special season of the year. This could explain the English Hymnal which says Saturday evensong from Trinity to Advent: that is the green season, so to speak. But does it also apply to the green season from Epiphany to Lent? Not according to the English Hymnal which provides Deus Creator Omnium for the Saturday evenings from the Octave of Epiphany to Lent. Even if it does apply to the Epiphany to Lent period, it seems it would not, pace the NEH, be for Sunday evening (other than the evening of Trinity Sunday), but for Saturday.

I also don't understand the bit that says it is used for the second and fourth weeks of the psalter in the Liturgy of the Hours. Perhaps someone can explain that claim to me.

Now for the text. Here (sourced from Michael Martin's Thesaurus Precum Latinarum) is what St Ambrose wrote (if, as we understand, it was indeed he).

O LUX beata Trinitas, et principalis Unitas, iam sol recedit igneus, infunde lumen cordibus.

Te mane laudum carmine, te deprecemur vespere: te nostra supplex gloria per cuncta laudet saecula.

Deo Patri sit gloria, eiusque soli Filio, cum Spiritu Paraclito, et nunc, et in perpetuum.

Here, about as precise as they come, is what J.M. Neale produced as a translation:

O Trinity of blessed light,
O Unity of princely might,
The fiery sun now goes his way;
Shed thou within our hearts thy ray.

To thee our morning song of praise,
To thee our evening prayer we raise;
Thy glory suppliant we adore
For ever and for evermore.

All laud to God the Father be;
All praise, eternal Son to thee;
All glory as is ever meet,
To God the holy Paraclete.

It is not only a verbatim translation, but of course it also fits the original metre so you can sing it to the correct plainsong tune. Hooray for JMN.

The EDITORS evidently thought some improvement was needed. "Princely" in line 2 has become "primal". I guess that this is supposed to render "principalis" (principal) in the sense of 'original' instead of Neale's 'princely' which tries to render the regal sense of 'principal'. Which is more appropriate? The idea is that as the sun goes down we need another light to shine in our hearts instead, namely the light of the Trinity that is also a unity. Is the thought that the light of the trinity is older than the light of the sun? That is presumably what the NEH Editors have taken to be the thought expressed by 'principalis'. Or is the thought that the light of God is superior, a more powerful guide? That is presumably what Neale thought. And it was for that reason that he used the word "might" which is not in the Latin but comes from the "princely" sense of principalis. The NEH Editors have kept the "might" but linked it with "primal" instead of "princely". I suppose that is intended to capture the ambiguity of "principalis", by retaining something of each sense. I'm not entirely convinced that the end result is comprehensible, however.

The second verse is unchanged.

The last verse has been rewritten to get rid of the 'Paraclete' word. Sad.

And between the second and the last verse, the EDITORS have added this piece of new doggerel:

O Trinity, O Unity,
Thou help of man's infirmity,
Protect us through the hours of night,
Who art our everlasting light.

I've been trying to discover whether the editors found this verse in some other latin hymn and decided to nick it. But I'm pretty sure it's entirely of their own making. For one thing it just says the same again as was said more neatly above, that the Trinity is our light, only that it then adds some waffle about protection which does not belong to the theme of the hymn (which is the thought that we want enlightenment). The EDITORS have gone off point, as though what we wanted was light to protect us from nasty things that creep up on us in the dark.

One thing that extra verse does add is a completely pointless bit of man speak ("man's infirmity"). Not clear what that is, but if you are going to compose new words in the twentieth century, you might at least try to make clear whether the word is translating homo or vir. In this case, of course, neither. So why "man"?

Praise to the Lord the Almighty

I thought it worth observing, briefly, that the hymn "Praise to the Lord the Almighty" has seven verses in the English Hymnal (three of them starred) and only six verses in the New English Hymnal (two of them starred) and that the origin of the starred verses is something of a mystery.

The hymn is (purports to be) a translation of Lobe den Herren, a German hymn published in 1680 in A und Ω Glaub- und Lieb­es­ü­bung by Joachim Neander (1650-80). The English version that we know is said to be translated by "Catherine Winkworth and others". The minimal bit of research I've done on the matter so far suggests that four verses were translated by Winkworth, that is the four that are unstarred in the hymn books. However, the Cyberhymnal gives seven verses and implies that all of them are by Winkworth. Still it seems that the EH and NEH concur in believing that some of their verses at least are not by Winkworth (and since those in the NEH are all, without exception, in the Cyberhymnal's version, it seems that it cannot be true both that everything in the Cyberhymnal entry is by Winkworth and that some of what is in the NEH entry is by "others".)

However, the plot thickens, for I have so far been unable to find more than five verses in the German. Indeed, Frank Colquhoun affirms that the original was of five stanzas (A Hymn Companion, page 22). This seems to be confirmed by the fact that the Cyberhymnal and several other sites provide five verses of the German text, the same five in all cases. This is what they have:

Lobe den Herren, den mächtigen König der Ehren!
Meine geliebte Seele, das ist mein Begehren.
Kommet zu Hauf! Psalter und Harfe, wacht auf!
Lasset den Lobgesang hören!

Lobe den Herren, der alles so herrlich regieret,
Der dich auf Flügeln des Adelers sicher geführet,
Der dich erhält, wie es dir selber gefällt.
Hast du nicht dieses verspüret?

Lobe den Herren, der künstlich und fein dich bereitet,
Der dir Gesundheit verliehen, dich freundlich geleitet.
In wieviel Not hat dich der gnädige Gott
Über dir Flügel gebreitet.

Lobe den Herren, der deinen Stand sichtbar gesegnet,
Der aus dem Himmel mit Strömen der Liebe geregnet.
Denke daran, was der Allmächtige kann,
Der dir mit Liebe begegnet.

Lobe den Herren; was in mir ist, lobe den Namen.
Alles was Odem hat, lobe mit Abrahams Samen.
Er ist dein Licht; Seele, vergiß es ja nicht;
Lob ihn und schließe mit Amen!

The five verses in the German appear to be verses 1 to 4 and verse 7 of the seven provided in the Cyberhymnal, that is these ones:

Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation!
O my soul, praise Him, for He is thy health and salvation!
All ye who hear, now to His temple draw near;
Praise Him in glad adoration.

Praise to the Lord, Who over all things so wondrously reigneth,
Shelters thee under His wings, yea, so gently sustaineth!
Hast thou not seen how thy desires ever have been
Granted in what He ordaineth?

Praise to the Lord, Who hath fearfully, wondrously, made thee;
Health hath vouchsafed and, when heedlessly falling, hath stayed thee.
What need or grief ever hath failed of relief?
Wings of His mercy did shade thee.

Praise to the Lord, Who doth prosper thy work and defend thee;
Surely His goodness and mercy here daily attend thee.
Ponder anew what the Almighty can do,
If with His love He befriend thee.

Praise to the Lord, O let all that is in me adore Him!
All that hath life and breath, come now with praises before Him.
Let the Amen sound from His people again,
Gladly for aye we adore Him.

Of these you will notice, perhaps, that verse 3 is unfamiliar. It doesn't appear in any of the hymn books that I own. So four of the verses we normally sing are from Neander's original, and there is a fifth that we do not normally sing (and which, perhaps, Winkworth did not translate?).

So where do the rest come from? There seem to be a total of eight verses in circulation, those five and three more. The English Hymnal had all three of the additional ones which it marked as "Part 2", all of which were starred. They went like this:

Praise to the Lord, Who, when tempests their warfare are waging,
Who, when the elements madly around thee are raging,
Biddeth them cease, turneth their fury to peace,
Whirlwinds and waters assuaging.

Praise to the Lord, who when sickness with terror uniting,
Deaf to entreaties of mortals, its victims is smiting,
Pestilence quells, Sickness and fever dispels,
Grateful thanksgiving inviting.

Praise to the Lord, Who, when darkness of sin is abounding,
Who, when the godless do triumph, all virtue confounding,
Sheddeth His light, chaseth the horrors of night,
Saints with His mercy surrounding.

Of these the first and third survive into the NEH but the second has been cut. None of them seems to be based on anything written by Neander.

Now it seems to me that the correct description of this hymn as it currently appears in the NEH is that it is part of a hymn by Neander, that part being translated by Winkworth, with some additional interpolated verses, perhaps composed in English not German, by someone else we know not whom. In this, the EH was if anything slightly less close to authenticity than the NEH because it had added three of those interpolated verses, not just two. Why they made it look as though they were translations of Neander's original we shall perhaps never know. But one wonders whether the NEH editors just copied the EH in pretending that it was all a translation from Neander.

The hornèd moon to shine by night

Today was what passes for Harvest Thanksgiving at Little St Mary's. Thankfully not too much of it.

We did sing some of those jolly hymns about how we plough the fields and scatter the seed (singing this hymn is the nearest I've ever got to actually ploughing any fields, and I don't suppose many of the rest of the congregation do these things very often either, but I'm sure the 'we' there is collective for the human race in general and how we as a race gather our food by toiling on the land).

One of those hymns that belongs to this season of praise and thanksgiving is "Let us with a gladsome mind, praise the Lord for he is kind".

There's a verse in that hymn (which is by John Milton, yes I mean the real one) which goes

"The hornèd moon to shine by night, Mid her spangled sisters bright."

The expression "to shine" follows on from the previous verse where we were told "He the golden-tressed sun caused all day his course to run." So we understand that (He caused) the horned moon to shine by night, as he caused the sun to run his course by day.

Unfortunately the editors of the NEH didn't like Milton's poetry. They have tried to improve it.
Here is what they have decided to offer for verse 5:

And the hornèd moon by night
Mid her spangled sisters bright.

Well, you know why they did that... because they thought they needed to "make a minor adjustment to secure a better musical accentuation." In other words we used to have to squeeze in an extra quaver before the first beat of the first bar for the word "the" on that verse, so as to sing 'horn' on the first crotchet. A feat we all learned quite early in life, as I recall. No great effort.

Well, you might say. Perhaps there is a virtue in a line that fits the rhythm of the music? Well no. Not if it is gibberish and ungrammatical. Just take a look at that verse they've constructed. It has no verb. Not only does it have no subject, but it has no verb either. Now the subject can be supplied from the verse before; it is "He", namely God. And we also supply a verb, namely "caused" from the previous verse. But now what did he cause the moon to do? That is no longer specified (according to Milton she was to shine, but according to these editors, what is she to do?). Well, what is she to do? I ask you.

Perhaps we are to supply yet another verb from the previous verse? If so, then what she is to do is to run her course (by night, as the sun ran his by day). But now we have lost the essence of this beautiful motif of the horned moon shining amidst her spangled sisters the stars. For the motif is not supposed to be of running a course, but of giving out light. And even if it did mean run her course, it's ungrammatical without supplying "her course", because you can't supply "his course" and not change the gender for the female moon.

Bad grammar and an acute loss of pictorial imagery. No no no.... Just don't do it, see?

Milton, he wrote poetry. Editors, you write rubbish. Got it?

Thus conspire we to adore him

Friday was Michaelmas day. At the sung mass we had a number of wonderful angelic hymns, lots of my favourites.

Among them was NEH 343, Bright the Vision that Delighted.

This hymn is by Richard Mant (or at least it once was). The NEH hasn't put a dagger on it, but it's not as it should be.

The problem is in verse 5. Here's what it should say:

With his seraph train before him,
With his holy Church below,
Thus conspire we to adore him,
Bid we thus our anthem flow:

It is interesting that the vicar preached that evening about 'conspiracy' and the meaning of the word 'conspire' (along with some other words about doing things together). He pointed out that to conspire is to breathe together and to be inspired together, and that we can be in a holy conspiracy in this sense.

It's almost as if he was preaching about the words we'd just sung in this hymn. Only, funnily enough we hadn't just sung them (except those of us who insist on singing the right words regardless of what's written in the hymn book).

No, funnily enough we'd sung this trite and awkward drivel:

With his seraph train before him,
With his holy Church below,
Thus unite we to adore him,
Bid we thus our anthem flow:

Too bad. Don't you think?

My God accept my heart this day

I wasn't in Church at the Gradual Hymn today, because I was out in the parish room catechising the children. But if I had been in Church I would have had to sing hymn 318 in the New English Hymnal.

Hymn 318 begins "My God accept my heart this day and make it always thine..."

According to the New English Hymnal it is by "Matthew Bridges and EDITORS."

Matthew Bridges lived in the 19th Century (1800-94). He started out as an Anglican but converted to Roman Catholicism in 1848, the same year as he published the first edition of Hymns of the Heart.

It seems that Matthew Bridges's hymn had five verses. However, only four of his verses appear in any of the Anglican hymn books so far consulted. The English Hymnal and some others print four verses and then add a doxology as a fifth verse, one of the standard doxologies that fit all common metre tunes:

All glory to the Father be,
All glory to the Son,
All glory, Holy Ghost, to thee,
While endless ages run.

Bridges didn't write that. Rather the hymn book editors tacked it on to make four verses into five.

The editors of the New English Hymnal had another idea about how to make the hymn up to five verses. How about writing a new verse to put on the end instead of the doxology? Writing new verses seems to be what they like best.

This is what they made up:

The vision of thy glory there
Shall be my hope and song,
That where thou dost a place prepare,
I may at length belong.

As a piece of doggerel, this looks fair enough until you think about it. "There" refers to heaven which was mentioned at the end of the previous verse.

But isn't there something odd about the tense? Because it is my hope now, isn't it, that I may at length belong in heaven? So it's not that it shall be my hope, but that it is now my hope, and it is now my song. So I suppose we want to say "The vision of thy glory there, let it now be my hope and song" (though that's a rather odd way to put it). The mood of "shall" in the third person is presumably imperative, but, I think, also future tense.

I suppose the best bet for making this make theological sense would be to suppose that we mean "it shall be my hope and song for the rest of my life, until I get to death". Indeed perhaps the phrase is supposed to be dependent upon the phrase "Let every thought and work and deed" at the start of verse 4. Perhaps we are supposed to be saying (verse 4) "Then life shall be thy service Lord...", and (verse 5) "the vision of thy glory shall be my hope and song". But more on this anon.

One might think that the new verse 5 was oddly constructed grammatically, because in the first two lines the content of the hope and song seem to be "the vision of thy glory there"

The vision of thy glory there
Shall be my hope and song.

Full stop, as it were.

and then we get another expression, "that where thou dost..." which also seems to be grammatically dependent on "hope and song".

...my hope and song,
that where thou dost a place prepare,
I may at length belong.

But presumably, the "that..." clause is meant to unpack what it means to say that the vision of thy glory is to be my hope and my song, namely it means that I shall hope and sing that where thou dost a place prepare I may at length belong.

Well, sort of all right, if a bit prosaic and pedantic. But now here's another question: do I hope that I may belong there? Probably I hope that I do belong there, no?

In fact what I hope for at length is not so much that I shall belong there, but that I shall be there. Belonging there is not something that needs to be delayed until later, though being there probably does.

Does one get the sense that "belong" is there just to rhyme with "song"?

And actually, come to think of it, don't you think that "song" is there just to rhyme with "belong"? Because really this is all about hope and nothing at all about song.

But anyway, why why why did we want to say any of this at all?

Because isn't it obvious that the end of verse 4 has to be the end of the hymn?

I mean, the end of verse 4 is just fantastic and neat, and sums up everything we needed to say with perfect closure:

Then life shall be thy service, Lord,
And death the gate of heaven.

We've already got it all there. Death as the gate of heaven neatly says everything that the editors are trying to achieve in their clumsy verse 5. But by adding verse 5 they have not only given us an otiose repeat of what verse 4 was saying, but actually undermined the effect of that closure. I have no doubt that Bridges knew what he was doing when he made "And death the gate of heaven" the closing line of his hymn. Let's just leave it that way, shall we?

But it seems that the hymn book editors think we need five verses not four.

Well, so be it. But, as I said, it seems that there were five verses in the original as Bridges wrote it, so we don't actually need the editors' help in turning it into a five verse hymn.

What is now verse 4 for us was, I think, verse 5 in Bridges's poem. It was indeed the last verse. But it was preceded by this verse:

May the dear blood once shed for me
My blest atonement prove
That I from first to last may be
The purchase of Thy love!

I don't quite know what's wrong with this verse. I think I would favour restoring that, in preference to the pseudo- composition of the NEH editors.

Oh, and actually I see that they've done more of their dastardly work earlier in the hymn. Compare this (probably what Bridges wrote, if Cyberhymnal is a reliable source):

Anoint me with Thy heavenly grace,
Adopt me for Thine own,
That I may see Thy glorious face,
And worship at Thy throne.

with this (what the NEH has):

Anoint me with Thy heavenly grace,
And seal me for thine own,
That I may run this earthly race,
In thy strong might alone.

The "seal me" bit was already in the English Hymnal, and before that in Hymns A and M but the rest is new work by the NEH.

Comments please...

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.

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?

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...

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!