Glory be to Jesus

Different ages of the church have produced and sung many kinds of hymns about the blood of Jesus Christ—indicating his death. Some are too gruesome or sentimental for contemporary taste, or go well beyond the emphasis or expression of the NT. This translation of a (probably) 18th-c Italian original is one of the most compact and scriptural of its kind. Viva! Viva! Gesu! Che per mio bene was published in Raccolta di Orazioni e Pie Opere colle Indulgenze, compiled by Telesforo Galli in 1807 but not necessarily written by him. In 1846 J H Newman obtained a copy of the complete work and helped Ambrose St John with a translation. Edward Caswall’s version of the 9-stz text headed ‘Hymn to the Precious Blood’ came in his 1857 Hymns for the Use of the Birmingham Oratory, and from there into wider use. In 1861 A&M revised the text, omitting two stzs, and the present version drops the original stz 3. In 2.4 ‘infinitely’ is changed to ‘wonderfully’, and stzs 4 and 5 began ‘Oft as it …’ and ‘Oft as earth … wafts its praise …’ The final stz read ‘Lift ye then your voices’, ending ‘praise the precious blood’; several hymnals have opted for the last line as given here. Others have omitted this item on the grounds of its theme or Roman origins, but it retains its place in many evangelical books; few hymns even attempt to incorporate Hebrews 12:24 as stz 3 does here.

The tune DERBY (or DERBE) is found in Sacred Harmony, the last tune-book of many brought out by John Wesley. In a different arrangement it was set there to one version of Away with our fears, but its long association with this text has earned it the name CASWALL. A new arrangement is made for Praise! Friedrich Filitz (or Fielitz) composed it for Wem in Leidenstagen, a hymn published in the chorale book he edited in Berlin in 1847. Derby is the English E Midlands city; Derbe, featuring in Acts 14 and 16, is in what is now SE Turkey; neither of these names has been explained. An altogether different feel to the hymn is given when it is sung to Vaughan Williams’ KING’S WESTON.

b Yateley, Hants 1814, d Edgbaston (nr Birmingham), Warwicks 1878. 4th son of the Vicar of Yateley; Chigwell Grammar Sch, Essex; Marlborough Coll, Wilts; Brasenose Coll Oxford (BA 1836, MA). As a student he issued a witty academic pamphlet ‘after the fashion of Aristotle’. He was ordained (CofE) in 1838; served in the parishes of Bishop’s Norton nr Gloucester; Milverton nr Warwick; and from 1840 at Stratford-sub-Castle, nr Salisbury. But in 1846, in his early 30s, he resigned his living, and a few months later became a Roman Catholic, Jan 1847. From then on his work of translating Lat hymns, already well advanced, gathered momentum; he published nearly 200 in Lyra Catholica (etc) in 1848, and ten years later The Masque of Mary and other poems. Other books of verse and drama followed. Widowed in 1849, he moved to J H Newman’s ‘Oratory’ in Birmingham, where in 1852 he was ordained as an RC. He remained there for the rest of his life; his collected hymns and poems were published posthumously, with a biographical preface, in 1908. He became one of those Roman converts of whom Ellerton, possibly a little biased, judged that ‘it can scarcely be said that they contributed much to the strength of the church of their adoption’. Of the 250 English hymn texts in The Westminster Hymnal of 1912, more than 50 are by Caswall, mostly translations. He is often the best-represented RC author in protestant hymn-books (5 in CH2004, 12 in The BBC Hymn Book of 1951, 9 in the 1965 Anglican Hymn Book and 13 in Common Praise 2000). As a Victorian hymntranslator he has been praised for the ‘great spirit and facility’ of his work; he ranks second only to the masterly and generally more accurate J M Neale, qv. Nos.217, 337, 347, 376, 421, 741.