Before Thy Mercy Seat

In honor of the anniversary of the consecration of my own church's current building (June 9, 1930). we have today a hymn of dedication.  Unfortunateky, we do not know what hymns they sang on that day.  One possibility might have been Christ is made the sure foundation (sung to the well-known tune REGENT SQUARE), but the parish at that time considered itself rather "high church," and unfortunately the more likely possibility from their hymnal of that time (Christ is our Cornerstone) does not have an available sound file for the tune they would have sung.

Thou, whose unmeasured temple stands,
Built over earth and sea,
Accept these walls that human hands
Have raised, O God, to thee.

And let the Comforter and Friend,
Thy Holy Spirit, meet 

With those who here in worship bend
Before thy mercy seat.

May all who seek be guided here
To find the better way;
And they who mourn, and they who fear,
Be strengthened as they pray.

May faith grow firm, and love grow warm,
And pure devotion rise,
While 'round these hallowed walls the storm
Of earth-born sorrow dies.

William Cullen Bryant, 1820; alt.

Tune: ST. FULBERT (C.M.)

Henry J. Gauntlett, 1849

The Lodestone of Thy Love

It's the last unofficial weekend of summer and many churches all over will be starting their program years next week. Attendance is often down in the summer months and some people who haven't been around since June will return again. So today's hymn is a sort of gathering song for the busy times ahead as Sunday school teachers prepare to meet their classes and choirs and music directors look ahead to a busy Christmas season. 

Jesus, united by thy grace,
And each to each endeared,
With confidence we seek thy face
And know our prayer is heard.

Make us into one spirit drink;
Baptize into thy name;
And let us always kindly think,
And sweetly speak, the same.

Help us to help each other, Lord,
Each other’s burdens bear;
Let all their friendly aid afford,
And feel each other’s care.

Touched by the lodestone of thy love,
Let all our hearts agree,
And ever toward each other move,
And ever move toward thee.

To thee, inseparably joined,
Let all our spirits cleave;
O may we all the loving mind,
That was in thee receive.

And when the fullest joy is given,
The same delight we prove,
In earth, till when we rise to heav'n,
Our all in all be Love.

Charles Wesley, 1742; alt.
Tune: ST. FULBERT (C.M.)
Henry J. Gauntlett, 1849




Four Years Ago: Queen Liliuokalani

Three Years Ago: Queen Liliuokalani

John Greenleaf Whittier

The Quaker poet and activist John Greenleaf Whittier, born today in 1807, did not consider himself a hymn writer.

I am really not a hymnwriter, for the good reason that I know nothing of music. Only a very few of my pieces were written for singing. A good hymn is the best use to which poetry can be devoted, but I do not claim that I have succeeded in composing one.

However, hymnal editors since his time have not shared his opinion, and even today most hymnals you will see contain his work. It's true that most of his hymns were not written as such, and are often taken from longer poems. Sometimes the same poem yields different hymns, or at least different arrangements of stanzas. John Julian, in his Dictionary of Hymnology (1907), lists 33 hymn texts by Whittier and traces their provenance from the original poems. Today, at Hymnary.org, which has references from hundreds more hymnals since Julian's work was compiled, they list 165 texts, and the number may even be larger.

This hymn is derived from Whittier's 1859 poem My Psalm, which is seventeen stanzas long, and has birthed several different arrangements of stanzas.

All as God wills, who wisely heeds
To give or to withhold,
And knoweth more of all my needs
Than all my prayers have told.

That more and more God's Providence
Of love is understood,
Which makes the springs of time and sense
Bright with eternal good --

That care and trial seem at last,
Through memory's sunset air,
Like mountain-ranges overpast,
In purple distance fair;

That all the jarring notes of life
Seem blending in a psalm,
And all the angles of its strife
Slow rounding into calm.

No longer forward nor behind
I look in hope or fear;
But, grateful, take the good I find,
The best of now and here.

John Greenleaf Whittier, 1859; alt.
Tune: ST. FULBERT (C.M.)
Henry J. Gauntlett, 1849

John Julian also wrote that Whittier's hymns were "characterized by rich poetic beauty, sweet tenderness, and deep sympathy with human kind."

A new book, Congregational Hymns from the Poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier (2009) by Samuel J. Rogal delves into this subject further, and you can see a preview of it online thanks to Google Books.


Two Years Ago: John Greenleaf Whittier

Henry J. Gauntlett

I don't think that I have very much more to say about composer Henry John Gauntlett than I said last year. After another year of digging through nineteenth-century hymnals, I am now more convinced that he did not write ten thousand hymn tunes, a number often ascribed to him. It appears to be one of those situations where a remarkable fact is stated in one source, and other sources repeat it without any independent verification.

It could have even been a typographical error -- maybe one thousand somehow became ten. Even one thousand would probably be more than anyone else has written, but if you count the many older tunes that Gauntlett arranged and harmonized over his long hymnic career it seems barely possible that he reached that smaller number. If there were truly ten thousand, practically every hymnal published in England during his lifetime (and perhaps beyond) would have had to include dozens of tunes not seen in any of the other hymnals, and this does not appear to be the case.

Here is another of his tunes, not much used today but still worthwhile, I think.

O for a closer walk with God,
A calm and heavenly frame,
A light to shine upon the road
That leads me to the Lamb!

Return, O holy Dove, return,
Sweet messenger of rest!
I hate the sins that made thee mourn
And drove thee from my breast.

The dearest idol I have known,
Whate’er that idol be
Help me to tear it from thy throne,
And worship only thee.

So shall my walk be close with God,
Calm and serene my frame;
So purer light shall mark the road
That leads me to the Lamb.

William Cowper, 1772
Tune: ST. FULBERT (C.M.)
Henry J. Gauntlett, 1849

Saint Fulbert of Chartres wrote the Latin hymn Chorus novae Jerusalem, translated as Ye choirs of new Jerusalem, for which this tune was written, but it has been used for several others over the years.

For some unfathomable reason, it seems that I have not presented any of the numerous hymns of William Cowper in the last year and a half. I do remember having him on my calendar last November, but not what came up to prevent my writing about him. He was a close friend of John Newton; the two of them collaborated on Olney Hymns (1779), named for the parish where they both lived for a time, and where Newton was the curate. Cowper suffered from mental illness for much of his life, so this hymn was perhaps a prayer for the "calm and serene."