For your mercy and your grace

In spite of the forward-looking stance of much of this hymn, its opening lines suggest the year’s end rather than its beginning, or perhaps the start of a New Year’s Eve midnight service. Its 7 original stzs, written 1841, were published in The Church of England Magazine in 1843, the year of their author Henry Downton’s ordination, aged 25. It soon found its way into standard hymnals, and is no. 1 in Songs of Praise whose editor called it ‘less weak and sentimental than other New Year hymns … it seems to be the one of Downton’s contributions that is destined to survive’. But editors assess the stzs differently; 2 and 3 here are omitted in some books which include instead ‘Who of us death’s awful road/ in the coming year shall tread …’ and ‘So within thy palace gate/ we shall praise on golden strings …’ In the Jubilate version adopted here, ‘Saviour and Redeemer’ replaces ‘Jesu our Redeemer’ or ‘Father and Redeemer’ (1.4); ‘what is past’ supersedes ‘all the past’ (2.3). 3.3 was previously ‘fierce our foes and hard the fight’; 4.2 ‘Rock of strength, be thou our stay’; and 5.4 ‘fit us for thy promised crown’.

The 17th-c German CULBACH has long been associated with the words; the suggested alternative VIENNA (603) is similar in mood. Alan Davies’ more recent tune PSALM 67 sounds a different note. It was composed for Timothy Dudley-Smith’s Mercy, blessing, favour, grace written in 1971, and published with that paraphrase of the Psalm in Psalm Praise (1973), GH (music edn 1977) and elsewhere. The similarity of the first lines may have suggested its appropriateness for this text.

b Pulverbatch, SW of Shrewsbury, Shrops 1818, d Hopton, Suffolk 1885. Trinity Coll Cambridge (BA/MA); ordained (CofE) 1843. He was Curate of Bembridge, IoW, and Holy Trinity Cambridge, then from 1849 incumbent of St John’s Chatham, Kent. After 6 years as British Chaplain at Geneva, in 1873 he became Rector of Hopton on the northern edge of Suffolk, where he stayed for the remaining 12 years of his life. The parish ch at Hopton has a spectacular and colourful hammerbeam roof; when the building was refurbished in 1879 his 6 daughters redecorated the wooden ceiling, using bosun’s chairs to reach the top. Among his writings were Lectures on Modern Atheism (a translation, 1878) and Holy Scripture and the Temperance Question (1878). Most of his hymns first appeared in the Church of England Magazine, and in 1873, the year of his final move, he published Hymns and Verses, comprising his original texts and translations from the French. Among some notable but now largely forgotten texts drawing on the Psalms is Harp, awake! Tell out the story. No.239.