How good is the God we adore

At first sight, and in the experience of many Christian groups, here is an ideal self-contained short hymn, eminently suitable and often chosen for the end of a meeting, sometimes as a variation from the spoken words of ‘The Grace …’ or the sung words of the Doxology (191). Like these, it is succinctly Trinitarian, and like the much fuller 161 it looks backward in praise and forward in faith. The history of the hymn, however, uncovers a story of both drastic pruning and unashamed editing which might have surprised its author Joseph Hart—the prolific Reformed Independent writer whose 2 stzs here have become his most widely used hymn. The text began life as ‘No prophet nor dreamer of dreams,/ no master of plausible speech,/ to live like an angel who seems/ or like an apostle to preach … / should meet with a moment’s regard,/ but rather be boldly withstood,/ if anything, easy or hard,/ he teach, save the Lamb and his blood’ (the first 16 lines form a single sentence). He no doubt had NT texts in mind to justify this call (if not to sing it?), but his starting point was the warning against, and absolute ban on, false prophets, in Deuteronomy 13:1 onwards.

The hymn was first published in the author’s own collection in 1759 (Hymns Composed on Various Subjects, with the Author’s Experience) and included with many more of his in Wm Gadsby’s (see 21, note) and similar books. With some exceptions the Christian consensus, following the almost immediate lead of Martin Madan’s Supplement in 1763, has tended to skip the substance of the poem and retain the final 8 lines, originally a single stz. Among current hymnals, PHRW effects a compromise by printing five much-edited 4-line stzs beginning ‘O Lord, close to thee we would cleave …’ (from the original line 25). The remnant of the text which is normally saved has variously begun ‘This God is the God we adore’ (as the original); ‘This, this is the God we adore’ (a Methodist usage from 1831 to the present); or very commonly as here, a version current since The Enlarged London Hymn Book of 1873. Virtually all books substitute ‘great’ for ‘large’ in 1.3, a further change made by Praise!, as by other recent hymnals, is at 2.1, replacing ‘’Tis Jesus …’ The effect of this process is to turn a sharply didactic hymn (‘Remember, O Christian, with heed …’—Hart’s stz 3) into a much more outgoing and generally useful expression of gratitude and adoration; though ‘Adoration’ was its original title. It hardly needs saying that advocates of singing exactly what the author wrote have difficulties sustaining their case here. But in 1964 the hymnologist Leslie Bunn wrote that to change the line ‘and neither knows measure nor end’, to ‘and knows neither …’, leaves the text ‘unpardonably weakened’. It certainly affects the sense; except among Congregationalists and Methodists, his pleas have largely fallen on deaf editorial ears. A further variation in the history of these 8 lines is that they have sometimes been attached, somewhat awkwardly and already altered, to the end of Wesley’s Thou Shepherd of Israel, and mine.

A further consensus has settled on its favourite tune CELESTE. This is found, thought to be already established but possibly printed for the first time, in Sacred Hymns and Harmonies … The Musical Companion to ‘Lancashire Sunday School Songs’, edited by J Compton of Bramley, Leeds, in 1857. It was set there to Elizabeth Mills’ very popular children’s hymn We sing of the realms of the blest. The tune has come in for some criticism and been omitted from many books, but was associated with this text from at least 1904; see the lively comments of W Milgate in Songs of the People of God (1982/85), p80. CH actually follows Golden Bells in also attaching it to 773. Hymnals wishing to avoid the tune resort to (among others) Lawrence Bartlett’s LEURA or Peggy Spencer Palmer’s ADORAMUS.

b London 1712, d London 1768. He had an evangelical nonconformist upbringing and showed early promise in Heb, Gk, Lat and French. He loved to read and translate classical poetry and soon became a classics teacher. But for some 7 years he struggled with his conscience; 1740 brought a spiritual and personal crisis but did not permanently resolve the issue. He joined the ‘free grace’ debate on Whitefield’s side against Wesley, but fell into an antinomian laxity towards sin leading to a delight in it. He proceeded to lead a racy and unholy social life, while experiencing occasional spasms of remorse and regret. From his marriage in 1751 he began a mode of reformation and prayer. Following his now elderly parents’ example, he began in 1755 to hear George Whitefield preach at the Moorfields Tabernacle, which brought him new conviction, even hope, but no assurance. Finally, after a service at the Fetter Lane Moravian Chapel in 1757, he came home and on his knees before God was truly born again.

For the next two years he wrote several hymns, in which Gethsemane and the cross are major themes. In 1760 he became minister of an Independent congregation in Jewin St in the City of London, meeting in a large and recently-vacated chapel. (He was succeeded by the Baptist Jn Hughes, and the church divided.) In that year he published his Hymns, etc, composed on various subjects, with a Preface containing a brief and summary account of the Author’s experience (etc). A supplement and an appendix were added in the 1760s; by 1767 the book had reached its 5th edn, and apparently by popular demand (‘earnest and repeated enquiries’) it had become the custom to preface the hymns with his autobiography, to glorify God and to enable readers ‘to see by it the riches of his free grace to the worst of men’. After much family sadness, he was himself taken ill and died at home at the age of 56. It is said that 20,000 people attended his funeral, and the burial at Bunhill Fields. Hart’s Hymns, as his collection became known, remained in print for many years, while Gadsby and other Reformed Baptist editors selected many of them for their own books. 9 of his hymns are in GH, and 7 in both edns of CH. His best hymns, particularly on the crucifixion, are very fine; while Gethsemane is a favourite theme and the opening text in his book, Come, all ye chosen saints of God, is a classic (‘On the Passion’); so is one with a far more striking opening, Now from the garden to the cross. His treatment of Eph 6 in Gird thy loins up, Christian soldier is Wesleyan as much as Pauline; 7 doxologies are included on the Watts model, and the collection ends with a metrical ‘Lord’s Prayer’. Some hymns collapse into quaintness (‘Mistaken men may bawl against the grace of God’; ‘Lord, my heart, a desert vast, thy manuring hand requires’; ‘Ye drunkards, ye swearers, ye muckworms of earth’; ‘Shun the shame of foully falling, cumber’d captives clogged with clay’). The more didactic hymns read like versified and sometimes witty sermons (‘Dear friends…My dear friends…’) and the more personal ones like testimonies (‘with swine a beastly life I led’). This is the kind of language which the more sophisticated Victorians, in particular, found intolerable; but at least the hymns are both realistic and picturesque, their rhymes are often ingenious and none of them is dull. No.307, 788.