At evening, when the sun had set

Henry Twells is quoted in the introductory ‘About Praise!’, p9 of the Full Music edn. If his words there are salutary, these are famously heartsearching; they suitably lead us from our 6 morning hymns to an ‘Evening’ section of 4, the most recent being from 1870. (‘There are too many evening hymns’ said Percy Dearmer in 1933, during notes on his Songs of Praise section of 18 of them. The decline in evening services in some places leads inevitably to less need of such hymns.)

This one was requested by Sir H W Baker, and written while the author was invigilating an exam at the Godolphin School, Hammersmith, W London, of which he was headmaster. It was intended for and first published in the 1868 Appendix to A&M. Even there, one of his 8 stzs was omitted: ‘And some are pressed with worldly care/ and some are tried with sinful doubt;/ and some such grievous passions tear/ that only thou canst cast them out’. When (as here) 6 stzs seem enough, it may be a greater loss to omit the remarkable 4th: ‘And some have found the world is vain/ yet from the world they break not free/ and some have friends who give them pain,/yet have not sought a friend in thee’. Songs of Praise cut it to 4 stzs in protest against an over-spiritual reading of the gospel account, or indeed any spiritual reading at all. Other books vary line 1 between ‘when the sun did/had/was set’ and ‘ere the sun was/did set’, depending on how editors see Mark 1:32 and Luke 4:40; the point is that sunset marked the end of the Sabbath, when such crowds were free to gather. Other variations here, adopted from those in the Jubilate version, include ‘evening’ for ‘even’ and ‘distress and pain’ for ‘divers pains’ (stz 1, cf Mark 1:32–34 AV). Stz 2 began ‘Once more ’tis eventide …’; 4.3 was ‘and they who fain would serve thee best’; and 5.1, ‘… thou too art Man’—the hardest line to represent fairly. At 4.1–2 no book seems to have ‘corrected’ to the singular the plural verbs following ‘none’; and 4.3 changed from ‘love’ to ‘serve’ before publication. There is scope for discussion here.

The almost invariable tune is ANGELUS. Its likely composer is Georg Joseph who edited the 1657 hymnal where its original form accompanies a text by Johann Scheffler. Several books published variously-named versions until it was firmly established in this form in the 1868 book. The name comes from that adopted by Scheffler when he became a Roman Catholic in 1653.
PS: A typical approach by D B Towner and Chas Alexander in Revival Hymns (1905) was to set the words to DBT’s tune in 6/8 time, turning the stately hymn into a ‘Gospel Song’ with the final stz used as a refrain ‘Thy touch has still its ancient power…’

b Ashte(a)d, nr Birmingham, Warwicks 1823, d Bournemouth, Dorset 1900. School in Birmingham; St Peter’s Coll Cambridge (BA 1848). Ordained in 1849, he was Curate of Gt Berkhamsted 1849–51 and then the first Headmaster of Godolphin (Grammar) Sch at Hammersmith, W London, 1856–70, which he established as a front-rank boarding school. He returned to parish ministry in 1870 as Rector (briefly) of Baldock, nr Stevenage, Herts; then from 1871 of Waltham-on-the-Wolds nr Melton Mowbray, Leics (also Hon Canon of Peterborough from 1884). His last 10 years were then spent in Bournemouth, Dorset, where the winters were kinder to his health and where he built and partly endowed St Augustine’s Ch. His Hymns and other Stray Verses appeared posthumously in 1901, as did his Sermons on Hymns (etc; 16 hymns including Te Deum and a powerful exposition of When I survey) and a separate memoir by Dr W Clavell Ingram, also in 1901. While sometimes churchy (but anti-Roman), his preaching was often both biblical and eloquent. Although his other hymns are virtually forgotten with the exception of the searching Not for our sins alone (which almost uniquely asks forgiveness for our prayers), his fame seems assured by the one which is included here and still in most other hymn-books. Routley saw him as one with ‘a very searching and powerful imagination’; a ‘swimmer-against-the-stream…who did not quite fit into the Tractarian picture…a Victorian who should be looked at again by editors’. The ‘Standard’ A&M had 7 of his hymns, including the dramatic The voice of God’s creation found me. His 6 (or 12) lines on ‘time’, inscribed on a clock-case in Chester Cathedral, are also often quoted: ‘When as a child I laughed and wept, time crept…’. No.221.