Great God of wonders, all your ways

This 18th-c hymn rooted in Micah 7:18 expresses the same sense of wondering assurance as the later texts at 243 and 245. The American Samuel Davies’ work first appeared in 1769, some years after his death, in Thomas Gibbons’ Hymns adapted to Divine Worship, where it was headed ‘The glories of God in pardoning sinners’. It is a landmark in transatlantic writing, ‘unique among American hymns for its theological weight and grandeur’ (Routley). The refrain provides a further crux for revisers; after considering several options, the editors considered the chosen version more faithful than any other to the intention of ‘Who is a pardoning God like thee,/ or who has grace so rich and free?’ Other changes include 1.4 (from ‘more godlike and unrivalled shine’); 2.2 (often changed from ‘such guilty, daring worms …’); and 4.3 (from ‘sins of deepest dye’). Some have defended the original ‘worms’, with selected biblical support; the problem, as with ‘deepest dye’, is that the expression no longer conveys what it once did. There is no point in defending authenticity to the point of descending into comedy. On worms in hymns, see the short but classic essay by Percy Dearmer in Songs of Praise Discussed (1933) pp116–117. More to the point, did William Blake consciously echo stz 3, if he knew it, when writing in his Songs of Innocence in 1789, ‘To Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love/ all pray in their distress …’?

RHYD-Y-GROES is named after the Dyfed village of Pontrhydygroes near Aberystwyth, where Thomas David Edwards was so moved by the scenery on a visit in 1899 that he immediately composed the tune. Its opening is reminiscent of a German chorale; the American connection remains, since this Welshman was born and grew up in Pennsylvania. The alternative SURREY (=CAREY, 240, 596) is also in wide use.

b nr Summit Ridge, Newcastle Co, Delaware, USA 1723 (or 1726?), d Princeton, NJ, USA 1761. Educated privately under the guidance of Samuel Blair, a clergyman from Chester Co, Pennsylvania. As a young man he received some financial help intended for a visiting Presbyterian preacher, Wm Robinson of New Brunswick, who declined the gift but passed it on to Samuel for his theological training. In 1745 he was licensed by the Presbytery of Newcastle (Delaware) as a probationer to serve congregations in Virginia, and ordained in 1748. He visited England in 1753 on behalf of the New Jersey Presbyterian College at Princeton (now the Univ of Princeton), where he later succeeded Jonathan Edwards as President and hence was known even in hymn-books as ‘President Davies’, but where he died a few years later at the age of 37. Thomas Gibbons, biographer of Isaac Watts, printed Davies’ sermons posthumously in 5 volumes. He also included 16 of his hymns (probably the complete list) in Hymns Adapted to Divine Worship (1769). The text included in Praise! has proved durable, in its original or revised form; around 1900 it featured in over 100 hymn-books in the UK alone, and remains a world-wide evangelical favourite. His other hymns, many of them solemn (including one about our Prophet, Priest and King: Jesus, how precious is thy name), continued to be sung well into the 19th c but have not lasted beyond it; ‘solid, but somewhat dry and heavy’, was the verdict of the American Prof F M Bird in Julian. No.246.