Go to dark Gethsemane

Like 4 acts of a concentrated drama, James Montgomery’s stzs take us from a garden of grief to one of great joy, via the trial and death of the Saviour. The connecting links are the verbs of each 1st line (Go, follow, climb, hasten) and the 6th (‘learn’ x3, then a final ‘teach’). Somewhat astonishingly, A&M stopped short at stz 3, possibly because it thus makes a powerful passiontide hymn, whereas to set the full version for Easter, starting with Gethsemane and dominated by suffering, would give a strange effect. (It was dropped completely in 1983, but reinstated with all 4 stzs in 2000, boldly set for Maundy Thursday, 3 days before Easter.)

This wide range of theme, using all 4 of the Gospels, requires the hymn to be chosen, placed and introduced with extra care in a service, as with 400, 508 etc. The author was sufficiently drawn to this approach, or dissatisfied with his first attempt, to produce two versions of which this is the 2nd. Initially it appeared in Cotterill’s 1820 Selection, then in a rewritten form which is virtually a different hymn (as here) in the writer’s own The Christian Psalmist, with the title ‘Christ our example in suffering’. The only significant change from this text is at 4.2, which read ‘where they laid his breathless clay’.

Hymnal editors have rarely agreed on the most appropriate tune. David Evans’ LUCERNA LAUDONIAE (‘Lantern of the Lothians’) was composed for the quite different For the beauty of the earth (206), appearing with that hymn in the Revised Church Hymnary of 1927, for which he was Music Editor. His own authorship of the tune is generally assumed but far from certain; it appeared over the name ‘Edward Arthur’, a pseudonym of his gifted son who died aged 18 when he had already composed several tunes. Wesley Milgate conjectures ‘that Dr Evans reworked an idea of his son’s in producing the music, and used his pseudonym as a tribute and an acknowledgement.’ The tune name is that given to a former monastery in E Lothian and to a 15th-c church built on the site; the minister of the succeeding congregation in 1927 was heavily involved in work on the hymnal, now known as CH2. The Methodists chose John Cluley’s LLYFNANT for their 1933 book, but dropped the hymn in 1983.

b Irvine, Ayrshire, Scotland 1771, d Sheffield 1854. His father John was converted through the ministry of John Cennick qv. James, the eldest son, was educated first at the Moravian centre at Fulneck nr Leeds, which expelled him in 1787 for wasting time writing poetry. By this time his parents had left England for mission work in the West Indies. In later life he regularly revisited the school; but having run away from a Mirfield bakery apprenticeship, failed to find a publisher in London, and lost both parents, he served in a chandler’s shop at Doncaster before moving to Sheffield, where from 1792 onwards he worked in journalism. Initially a contributor to the Sheffield Register and clerk to its radical editor, he soon became Asst Editor and (in 1796) Editor, changing its name to the Sheffield Iris. Imprisoned twice in York for his political articles, he was condemned by one jury as ‘a wicked, malicious and seditious person who has attempted to stir up discontent among his Majesty’s subjects’. In his 40s he found a renewed Christian commitment through restored links with the Moravians; championed the Bible Society, Sunday schools, overseas missions, the anti-slavery campaign and help for boy chimney-sweeps, refusing to advertise state lotteries which he called ‘a national nuisance’. He later moved from the Wesleyans to St George’s church and supported Thos Cotterill’s campaign to legalise hymns in the CofE. He wrote some 400, in familiar metres, published in Cotterill’s 1819 Selection and his own Songs of Zion, 1822; Christian Psalmist, or Hymns Selected and Original, in 1825—355 texts plus 5 doxologies, with a seminal ‘Introductory Essay’ on hymnology—and Original Hymns for Public, Private and Social Devotion, 1853. 1833 saw the publication of his Royal Institution lectures on Poetry and General Literature.

In the 1825 Essay he comments on many authors, notably commending ‘the piety of Watts, the ardour of Wesley, and the tenderness of Doddridge’. Like many contemporary editors he was not averse to making textual changes in the hymns of others. He produced several books of verse, from juvenilia (aged 10–13) to Prison Amusements from York and The World before the Flood. Asked which poems would last, he said, ‘None, sir, nothing— except perhaps a few of my hymns’. He wrote that he ‘would rather be the anonymous author of a few hymns, which should thus become an imperishable inheritance to the people of God, than bequeath another epic poem to the world’ on a par with Homer, Virgil or Milton. John Ellerton called him ‘our first hymnologist’; many see him as the 19th century’s finest hymn-writer, while Julian regards his earlier work very highly, the later hymns less so. 20 of his texts including Psalm versions are in the 1916 Congregational Hymnary, and 22 in its 1951 successor Congregational Praise; there are 17 in the 1965 Anglican Hymn Book and 26 in CH. In 2004, Alan Gaunt found 64 of them in current books, and drew attention to one not in use: the vivid account of Christ’s suffering and death in The morning dawns upon the place where Jesus spent the night in prayer. See also Peter Masters in Men of Purpose (1980); Bernard Braley in Hymnwriters 3 (1991) and Alan Gaunt in HSB242 (Jan 2005). Nos.152, 197, 198, 350*, 418, 484, 507, 534, 544, 610, 612, 641, 657*, 897, 959.