Happy are those, beyond all measure blessed

Psalm 32 ‘speaks to the troubled conscience’—Timothy Dudley-Smith, from his fuller notes in A House of Praise (2003). It is the second of the penitential Psalms (see 6, note) and Martin Luther saw it as one of four ‘Pauline’ ones most clearly anticipating the apostle’s doctrine, together with 51, 130 and 143. John Stott’s headings are ‘God’s forgiveness of the past’ (vv1–7); ‘God’s guidance for the future’ (vv8–9). Perhaps its composition was one fruit of Psalm 51:13–14? John Donne preached a series of 8 sermons on it, one entitled ‘The Grace of Repentance’; like the 51st it spoke powerfully to him before he spoke of it to others. Bill Batstone’s words and music Happy is the one whose sin freely is forgiven featured with others in the 1990 Songs from the Psalms, and elsewhere. This paraphrase was one of ‘Nine New Hymn Texts’, including 6 Psalm versions requested for Praise!, circulated by the author in 1997. Like 20 (see notes) it was written in Nov 1996 at Killay and Ford. It next appeared in the N American Supplement 99, and in the UK in Sing Glory. Timothy Dudley- Smith here follows the apostle Paul (Romans 4:7, using the Gk OT) in making it plural and therefore inclusive. ‘God’s forgiveness’, he notes, ‘is considered under a number of different images; hence the fourfold repetition in stanza 1 of guilt gone, faults forgiven, hearts blameless, and uncondemned.’ But Praise! has not followed the author’s surprising recommendation of the tune YORKSHIRE, nor the choice of David Iliff’s FALERA in Sing Glory, opting rather for David Preston’s more reflective HILASTERION (Gk for ‘propitiation’, the means by which wrath is appeased and sin removed; Romans 3:25 etc). The tune was composed in 1997 for these words and is first published here.

b Manchester 1926. Tonbridge School, Kent, Pembroke Coll Camb, and Ridley Hall Camb; ordained (CofE) 1950. After ministry at Northumberland Heath (nr Erith, Kent) and Bermondsey (SE London) he worked with the Evangelical Alliance, editing Crusade magazine before moving to the Church Pastoral Aid Society, becoming Gen Sec in 1965. Subsequently he became Archdeacon of Norwich (73–81), then suffragan Bp of Thetford until his retirement to Ford, nr Salisbury, in 1992. A writer of verse (including a mastery of the comic sort) from his youth, he is seen by Prof J R Watson (in The English Hymn, 1997) as igniting the late 20th cent ‘hymn explosion’ with his 1961 Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord, one of the hymns from that period in the widest use. He is the author of over 250 hymn texts in a similar number of hymnals worldwide, first collected in Lift Every Heart (1984), most recently in A House of Praise ( 2003). The latest of 4 smaller supplements, A Door for the Word, appeared in 2006, and 2 smaller booklets of his texts with accompanying music were published in 2001 and 2006: respectively Beneath a Travelling Star and A Calendar of Praise.

For many years the Bible commentator Derek Kidner was a mentor for most of TDS’s early drafts. While some were begun or completed at home, on trains or elsewhere, several were the fruit of family holidays on the Cornish coast, as a pre-breakfast employment (and delight) overlooking the beach near The Lizard. As reviewers have often observed, his texts are notable for their varied metres, disciplined rhyming, and biblical content; the theme of redemption through the cross and the shed blood of our Lord Jesus Christ is a theme encountered consistently, naturally and with variety; so is the fact that ‘the Lord is risen’. Without plagiarising, the hymns deliberately draw on a wide range of earlier poets and other authors for suggested ideas, as the attached notes fully illustrate. 37 items are included in Sing Glory (1999); 18 are in the N American Worship and Rejoice (2001), 9 in the 2005 edn of A Panorama of Christian Hymnody and 33 in the new Anglo- Chinese Hymns of Universal Praise (new edn, 2006). His other books include A Flame of Love: A personal choice of Charles Wesley’s verse ( 1987), Praying with the English Hymn-writers (1989), and a 2 vol biography (the first) of John R W Stott (1999, 2001). He has served on editorial groups for Psalm Praise (1973) and Common Praise (2000), and has addressed and been honoured by both the N American and British Hymn Societies, respectively as Fellow and Hon Vice-President. In 2003 he was awarded the OBE ‘for services to hymnody’. Hymn festivals in Tunbridge Wells and Salisbury, together with an extended BBC ‘Sunday Half Hour’ on New Year’s Eve, marked his 80th birthday at the end of 2006, following the publication of a seasonallyarranged selection of 30 texts in A Calendar of Praise (with music, mostly traditional). In an opening address to the Hymn Soc’s Guildford conference in its 70th year (also 2006), TDS spoke of his (and our) ups and downs as ‘Snakes and Ladders’, concluding with that greatest of ‘ladders’ from Gen 28, referred to in Elizabeth’s Clephane’s text (699) which has meant everything to him: ‘so seems my Saviour’s cross to me/ a ladder up to heaven’. Nos.10, 20, 25, 26, 32, 34, 41, 56, 60, 63, 65, 69B, 72, 73, 91B, 115, 119H, 134, 141, 218, 238, 320, 327, 351, 360, 389, 402, 405, 410, 413, 436, 459, 466, 488, 497, 516, 531, 553, 558, 623, 628, 659, 688, 697, 746, 750, 784, 823, 924, 925, 939, 949, 951, 1001, 1002, 1005, 1006, 1009, 1019, 1020, 1025, 1042, 1077, 1136, 1166, 1174, 1214.