As with gladness men of old

Although few would place this in the very first rank among hymns, a wide range of authors have been warm in their appreciation, among them (crucially) Lord Selborne, followed by Manning (‘a model of straight, clear, clean verse’), Routley and others. More recently, see Gordon Giles in the Church Music Quarterly, Dec 2007. Its writing can be traced to the Epiphany, and therefore 6 Jan, when William Chatterton Dix was in his early twenties (21?), but the exact year is uncertain; c1858. He was ill in bed in his Bristol home, but on reading the appointed (Prayer Bk) Gospel for the day, Matthew 2:1–11, he began to write and had completed it by the evening. The text is straightforward, built upon the words ‘as … so …’, and moving us on further in stz 4. It is more disciplined and truer to Scripture than the (then novel) approach of the American J H Hopkins in We three kings, which Dix may have consciously hoped to counteract. The hymn was printed in his privately-circulated Hymns of Joy and Love for St Raphael’s church, but it had already reached the trial copy of A&M in 1859 and its 1861 first edn. Lord Selborne’s enthusiastic imprimatur came at a church congress in 1866. In the 1867 A&M small changes were made, and here the Jubilate version is preferred. This emends 1.6 from ‘evermore be led to thee’; 2.5–6 from ‘So may we with willing feet/ ever seek thy mercy-seat’; 3.2 from ‘rude and bare’; and 5.1 from ‘country’. PHRW omits stz 3, which affects the balance of the hymn and misses a significant part of the story.

The tune DIX (or TREUER HEILAND) was adapted and arranged by William H Monk for A&M, from the music of Conrad Kocher. This was set to Treuer Heiland, wir sind hier (‘Faithful Saviour, we are here’) in the 1838 book Stimmen aus dem Reiche Gottes … herausgegeben (‘Voices from the kingdom of God’). Though now well-established, the tune has been criticised by many including Dix, who said (ironically, since it was named after him), ‘I dislike it, but now nothing will displace it’. This arrangement was made for the present book; ENGLAND’S LANE (67) is an attractive alternative.

b Bristol 1837, d Cheddar, Axbridge, Som 1898. He was named after the young poetic genius Thos Chatterton, whose tragically brief life had been chronicled by WCD’s father; Wm J Dix was a high church Bristol surgeon who nevertheless wrote a vivid and appreciative account of the preaching of Thos Binney (qv). William junr attended Bristol Grammar Sch; trained for a mercantile career and he became manager of a marine insurance company in Glasgow. He also wrote some very competent verse, marked by the high Anglicanism of his adult convictions. Among his published collections were Hymns of Love and Joy (1861), Altar Songs; verses on the Holy Eucharist (1867), Vision of All Saints (1871) and Seekers of a City (1878). He published two other devotional works and a children’s book on the life and example of Christ, and put into metrical form the prose translations of Gk and Abyssinian (Ethiopian) hymns made respectively by Richard Littledale and Rodwell. Many late-19th-c Anglocatholic books such as Lyra Eucharistica included his hymns; 5 of them were in EH and in the 1950 A&M. Two of his most popular have each been titled ‘The manger throne’: Like silver lamps in a distant shrine, and What child is this who, laid to rest, the latter written for and set to GREENSLEEVES. Both appeared in Christmas Carols New and Old (ed Bramley and Stainer, 1871) and many other collections since then. Nos.386, 918.