Brightest and best of the sons of the morning

In terms of the traditional church’s year (which gave rise to this and the previous item) we stay with the season of Epiphany—see also 331, note. Reginald Heber’s hymn, possibly the first he wrote at his vicarage at Hodnet, was published in good time for this New Year observance, in the Christian Observer of November 1811. It appeared in the author’s posthumous Hymns written and adapted to the Weekly Church Services of the year, 1827, then came into and out of favour among other collections. Its admittance to EH in 1906 encouraged more editors to be bolder, securing its place in many subsequent books. But sharp words have been exchanged about the hymn for 150 years. One doubt arose from the spring in the step of its dactylic rhythm; a more serious one, shared by John Ellerton, from the author’s poetically imaginative address to the ‘star of the east’, which some thought inadmissible in a hymn. Psalm 148 gives it some support; what is certainly inadmissible is to use ‘thine’ in stz 1 if such pronouns are marks of reverence (cf 368, note)! The main changes taken from the Jubilate version come in stz 3, from ‘Say, shall we yield him … odours of Edom’ (a name, say David and Jill Wright, mostly linked in Scripture to wars, never with odours); and ‘lavish’ for ‘ample’ in stz 4. But the central theme, and question, remain that of 50, 709 and 818, as of Rossetti’s In the bleak midwinter. Heber wrote 4 stzs; most books repeat the first to make a better conclusion than his last.

The words were set originally to the Scots tune WANDERING WILLIE. They have since been sung to EPIPHANY HYMN (274) or LIEBSTER IMMANUEL (119D); Hymns and Psalms offered SPEAN by J F Bridge (seemingly brave, but in the Methodist tradition), or G Thalben Ball’s JESMIAN which EH placed elsewhere. First choice here is Henry J Gauntlett’s SPRINGFIELD. This tune, sometimes ascribed to Peter Maurice, was once a 77 77 composition called STOWELL, as found in Gauntlett’s The Comprehensive Tune Book (1845–51) and nearer its present form in Maurice’s Choral Harmony (1852).

HEBER, Reginald, b Malpas Rectory, Cheshire 1783, d Trichinopoly, India 1826. Whitchurch Grammar Sch, Shrops, and private tuition at Neasden, Middlesex; Brasenose Coll Oxford; Newdigate Prize (1803) for his poem Palestine. John Ellerton, who became familiar with Heber’s native Cheshire 70 years later, says that he almost ‘took Oxford by storm…and he never lost a friend save by death’. In 1805 he became a Fellow of All Souls; after travels in Germany and Russia with John Thornton he was ordained to succeed his father (who held 2 livings several miles apart) as Rector of Hodnet in 1807, where he remained for 16 years. Rowland Hill (qv) was for a time a somewhat fiery and eccentric neighbour. Heber admired Newton and Cowper’s Olney Hymns and his own texts appeared in the firmly evangelical journal The Christian Observer from 1811; they were signed only ‘D.R.’, the final letters of his two names. Heber had begun to base new texts on the Sunday Epistle and Gospel, to be sung (daringly then!) after the sermon and creed, as part of an integrated approach within the service. His work was refused official authorisation, but he begged texts from poets such as Scott, Southey and Milman, and revived older material, for an influential collection published after his death (1827) including 57 of his own hymns written at Hodnet: Hymns written and adapted to the Weekly Church Service of the Year. 11 of these are found in EH, as also in the 1950 A&M Revised. Remarkably for his time, a national hymn includes, ‘From foes that would the land devour,/ from guilty pride and lust of power…’.

Heber was a reviewer, Bampton lecturer (1815), Lincoln’s Inn preacher (1822), biographer and editor of the complete works of Jeremy Taylor (1822), and for relaxation he loved sketching. From a distance he was attracted by India, but when offered the bishopric of Calcutta (with a diocese which then included Australia) he twice refused. In 1823, against his friends’ advice, he finally accepted, and began an energetic, gracious and prayerful ministry (as Calcutta’s 2nd bishop). He ordained the first Indian Anglican clergyman, Christian David, and founded the Bishop’s College, Calcutta. He was tireless in his travels, strongly opposed the Muslim treatment of women, but also respected local culture. But his health suffered, and after preaching in Tamil at a Confirmation service at Trichinopoly he suffered a stroke or brain haemorrhage and was found dead in his bath by a servant. His widow Amelia survived him.Julian assesses his writing as embodying purity, grace and reverence rather than scriptural strength or dogmatic force; one of the first was the archetypal From Greenland’s icy mountains (1819, with its famous lines about ‘Ceylon’s isle’), while Tennyson counted Holy, holy, holy as the greatest of all hymns. Some of his stirring missionary hymns are among those currently sung in Nigeria by ‘sending’ churches who have no doubt where the ‘heathen’ and the ‘benighted’ are now largely to be found. Nos.159, 387, 643, 865*.