Immortal, invisible, God only wise

In most 20th-c hymn books, Walter Smith’s words in their distinctive (stately yet galloping) rhythm appeared as a sonorous hymn to the Creator, rooted in 1 Timothy 1:17 and 6:16. This was true even of the textually conservative EH and CH, some 70 years apart, the former ending ‘All laud we would render; O help us to see/ ’tis only the splendour of light hideth thee’, while the latter (like GH and other books) repeated stz 1 for a more rounded conclusion. The present book, by restoring the author’s original intention in stzs 4 and 5, has enabled the work to reappear as what it always was—a fine Christian hymn to the Creator. W Garrett Horder’s influential Worship Song, published for Congregational churches in 1884 (words) and 1905 (music), has the nearly complete hymn at no.1.

The ascription of the Praise! version to ‘Jubilate Hymns’ refers to the words as far as 4.2 only, since no Jubilate book has yet restored the crucial final verse as it is here. Stz 3 originally had ‘… thou givest … thou livest …’; retaining the internal rhyme was not easy in a modernised text, and the placing of the commas indicates the editors’ understanding of what might be read differently by some. One further significant change comes in 4.4, where ‘veil’ is repeated (as in Worship Song) rather than introducing a new concept in ‘the vile [sic] from our heart’. One further stz, ‘Today and tomorrow with thee still are Now;/ nor trouble, nor sorrow, nor care, Lord, hast thou …’, is omitted by virtually all books. The hymn was published, significantly, in Hymns of Christ and the Christian Life in 1867; with the truncated text one might ask, Why?

Perhaps connected by the phrase ‘Great Father of glory’, 795 is set to Linda Mawson’s ABBEY WOOD, which is named here as a possible alternative tune. But ST DENIO has become the firmly established partner for these words since EH. The tune itself is much earlier, based on a traditional Welsh song, and known in the principality as JOANNA. ‘An old original Welsh melody’ called ROWLANDS published in 1802, and a ballad from c1810 translated as ‘A hundred years from now’, have been judged the clearest of several possible sources, with traces of a Welsh ‘cuckoo song’ in the falling minor 3rds in the melody. It is found in folk song collections, and in 1839 as a hymn tune called PALESTINA. The usual name (outside Wales) for the tune comes from Thomas Jones, Vicar of Denio near Pwllheli, who named it in his 1859 Welsh Church Tune and Chant Book. But no trace of the ‘saint’ survives.

b Aberdeen 1824, d Kinbuck, Dunblane, Perthshire (Stirling) 1908. Aberdeen Grammar Sch and Marischal Coll; Aberdeen Univ (MA 1841); then studied under Thos Chalmers at New Coll Edinburgh. After a probationary period at Newburgh. Aberdeenshire, he was ordained in 1850 to minister to the Ch of Scotland congregation meeting in Chadwell St, Pentonville, N London. After an undistinguished beginning there he returned north in 1854 to pastor Orwell Free Ch at Milnathort nr Kinross, followed by the Free Tron Ch, Glasgow, 4 years later. From 1876 and for some 20 years until his retirement in 1896 he was Minister of the Free High Ch in Edinburgh. Although the Free Church’s 1867 General Assembly had ‘affectionately admonished him’ for some liberal tendencies, and he added to this the offence of wanting a more relaxed form of subscription to the Confession of Faith, he became the Assembly’s Moderator for its Jubilee year 1893. He published several books including collections of hymns and other verse (1902); ‘rich in thought and vigorous in expression’, says F M Bird in Julian. These included several humorous and ‘unpretentious’ poems, some over pseudonyms. Even in Scotland, no more than 2 of his hymns seem to have lasted; one remains well-known but both usually appear in a truncated form. Having been awarded a Glasgow DD in 1869, to which both Aberdeen and Edinburgh Univs added the LLD (1876 and 1893), he died at home a little short of his 84th birthday. Nos.248, 356.