Hallelujah! Raise the anthem

To the Baptist Job Hupton and the Gospel Magazine of Sept 1805 we owe the basis of this hymn, Come, ye saints, and raise an anthem; to J M Neale and the Christian Remembrancer of July 1863 we owe a considerable revision, Come, ye faithful, raise … ; to Jubilate Hymns and HTC in 1982 we owe a further adjustment to provide the text used here. (Songs of Praise 1931, partly followed by The Christian Hymnary of 1938 and the 1962 Baptist Hymn Book, has a very different text starting ‘Come, ye people …’) Hupton wrote 13 stzs, of which the present stz 3 substantially survives; Neale’s rewrite came in a somewhat patronising article on ‘Hymns and hymnals’, followed by its appearance in the 1867 People’s Hymnal. As with his text, which brought the hymn into wide use among Anglicans, the stzs begin with an assonance in lines 1 and 3, which by the end has disappeared. In his now traditional (if not original) version, 1.2 read ‘cleave the skies with shouts of praise’; 3.6, ‘reigning where he was before’; stz 4 began ‘High on yon celestial mountains/ stands his sapphire throne, all bright’; and a 5th stz, now omitted, was ‘Bring your harps and bring your incense,/ sweep the string and pour the lay …’

The almost universal tune for this hymn has been NEANDER (=UNSER HERRSCHER), originating in Joachim Neander’s 1680 collection from Bremen, set there to Unser Herrscher, unser König (‘Our Ruler, our King’) and probably by Neander himself. It has a strong, firm melody, used also at 356.

b Staffordshire 1762, d Claxton, nr Norwich, Norfolk 1849. As a youth with only basic education he worked at the local blacksmith’s forge and was converted through the ministry of John Bradford, one of Lady Huntingdon’s preachers or chaplains. For some time afterwards, after training at Trevecca Coll, he too became one of the team she supported. But later he embraced baptist views and for many years from 1794 he ministered to the Baptist congregation at Claxton, Norfolk. His hymns were first published in the Gospel Magazine, to which he also contributed other material, under various initials or noms-de-plume; 22 were reprinted as Hymns and Spiritual Poems posthumously and with a memoir, in 1861. His ‘bold and vigorous imagination and great command of language’ are noted by his fellow-Baptist W R Stevenson in Julian. Hupton’s best-known hymn is a rare Baptist inclusion in some mainstream Anglican hymn-books, although J M Neale (qv) felt the need to revise it for A&M, sometimes helpfully. No.297*.

b at Lamb’s Conduit St, Bloomsbury, Middx (C London) 1818, d East Grinstead, Sussex 1866. He was taught privately and at Sherborne Sch; Trinity Coll Cambridge (BA 1840), then Fellow and Tutor at Downing Coll. On 11 occasions he won the annual Seatonian Prize for a sacred poem. Ordained in 1841, he was unable to serve as incumbent of Crawley, Sussex, through ill health, and spent 3 winters in Madeira. He became Warden of Sackville Coll, E Grinstead, W Sussex, from 1846 until his death 20 years later. This was a set of private almshouses; in spite of a stormy relationship with his bishop and others over ‘high’ ritualistic practices, he developed an original and organised system of poor relief both locally and in London, through the sisterhood communities he founded.

With Thos Helmore, Neale compiled the Hymnal Noted in 1852, which did much to remove the tractarian (‘high church’) suspicion of hymns as essentially ‘nonconformist’. Among his many other writings, arising from a vast capacity for reading, was the ground-breaking History of the Eastern Church and the rediscovery and rejuvenating of old carols (collections for Christmas in 1853 and Easter the year following). His untypical, eccentric but popular item Good King Wenceslas was a target for the barbs of P Dearmer, qv, who (like others since) voiced the hope in 1928 that it ‘might be gradually dropped’.

Neale and his immediate circle had a pervasive effect on many things Anglican, including architecture, furnishing and liturgy, which has lasted until our own day. He founded and led the Camden Society and edited the journal The Ecclesiologist in order to give practical local expression to the doctrines of the Tractarians. But his greatest literary work lay in his translation of classic Gk and Lat hymns. In this he pioneered the rediscovery of some of the church’s medieval and earlier treasures, and his academic scholarship blended with his considerable and disciplined poetic gifts which showed greater fluency with the passing years. Like Chas Wesley he was an extraordinarily fast worker, given the high quality of so much of his verse. His translations from Lat, mainly 1852–65, kept the rhythm of the sources; among his original hymns (1842–66) he was critical of his own early attempts to write for children. But he considered that a text in draft should be given plenty of time to mature or be improved; he voluntarily submitted many texts to an editorial committee. Even so, some were attacked by RCs because in translation he had removed some offensive Roman doctrines; others, because they leant too far in a popish direction. His own position was made clear by such gems as, ‘We need not defend ourselves against any charge of sympathising with vulgarity in composition or Calvinism in doctrine’.

Of his final Original Sequences and Hymns (1866), many were written ‘before my illness’, some over 20 years earlier, and ‘the rest are the work of a sick bed’—JMN, writing a few days before his death. His daughter Mary assisted in collecting his work, and many of his sermons were published. He was familiar with some 20 languages, and had a notable ministry among children, writing several children’s books. He had strong views on music, and was a keen admirer of the poetry of John Keble, qv. 72 items (most of them paraphrases) are credited to him in EH, and he has always been wellrepresented in A&M, featuring 30 times in the current (2000) edn, Common Praise. Julian gives him extended treatment and notes ‘the enormous influence Dr Neale has exercised over modern hymnody’. In A G Lough’s significantly titled The Influence of John Mason Neale (1962) and Michael Chandler’s 1995 biography, while the main interest of the writers lies elsewhere, there are interesting chapters respectively on his ‘Hymns, Ballads and Carols’ and his ‘Hymns and Psalms’. What Charles Wesley was with original texts, so was Neale with translations, not least in the sense that, as a contemporary put it, ‘he was always writing’. Nos.225, 297*, 338, 346, 371*, 407, 442, 472, 567, 881, 971.