Lord, teach us how to pray aright

‘Lord, teach us to pray …’ say the disciples in Luke 11:1. To this request, motivated by Jesus’ own praying and John the Baptist’s teaching, the answer they receive is first of all the prayer beginning ‘Our Father’ and including ‘your will be done’. This hymn is the best known, and one of the first, of several alluding to this Scripture. James Montgomery takes a worthy place beside or even above Wesley and Newton as the author of more than one classic hymn about prayer, though it is oddly omitted by some standard hymnals. Unlike 612, which reserves its petition until the final stz and also uses Luke 11:1, it is itself a prayer throughout, in the spirit of 606 and 607. It was written in 1818, printed on a broadsheet for use in Nonconformist Sunday Schools in Sheffield, and included the following year in the 8th edn of Cotterill’s Selection. There it is headed ‘The preparation of the heart in Man’ (Proverbs 16:1); the author revised it in 1825. Routley comments that it sounds a ‘specially personal and devotional note so sanely and unaffectedly … [and with 484] is equally of the romantic tradition.’ Stzs 1, 5 (often omitted), 6 and 8 are virtually unchanged from the 1825 text; ‘on our way’ replaces ‘by the way’ at 2.4. Stz 4 (missing from GH) was ‘God of all grace, we come to thee/ with broken … / give, what thine eye delights to see …’; 7.2,4, ‘though mercy long delay … and trust thee, though thou slay.’ Stz 3, also absent from many books, has in CH ‘in weakness, want and woe … /Lord, whither shall we go?’

FARRANT is the tune chosen by Congregational Praise, CH and GH, as here. Although ascribed to and named after Richard Farrant, its history is more complex and involves many others. The 16th-c anthem Lord, for thy tender mercies’ sake, from which it is adapted, was once attributed to Farrant, but is now thought to be from a later period. It may have been composed by his pupil John Hilton and adapted by Edward Hodges of Bristol, who sent it to W H Havergal for his Old Church Psalmody of 1847. It cannot be said to be the definitive music for the words, however; it is used with several other texts, and ST HUGH (764) is often found with this one.

b Irvine, Ayrshire, Scotland 1771, d Sheffield 1854. His father John was converted through the ministry of John Cennick qv. James, the eldest son, was educated first at the Moravian centre at Fulneck nr Leeds, which expelled him in 1787 for wasting time writing poetry. By this time his parents had left England for mission work in the West Indies. In later life he regularly revisited the school; but having run away from a Mirfield bakery apprenticeship, failed to find a publisher in London, and lost both parents, he served in a chandler’s shop at Doncaster before moving to Sheffield, where from 1792 onwards he worked in journalism. Initially a contributor to the Sheffield Register and clerk to its radical editor, he soon became Asst Editor and (in 1796) Editor, changing its name to the Sheffield Iris. Imprisoned twice in York for his political articles, he was condemned by one jury as ‘a wicked, malicious and seditious person who has attempted to stir up discontent among his Majesty’s subjects’. In his 40s he found a renewed Christian commitment through restored links with the Moravians; championed the Bible Society, Sunday schools, overseas missions, the anti-slavery campaign and help for boy chimney-sweeps, refusing to advertise state lotteries which he called ‘a national nuisance’. He later moved from the Wesleyans to St George’s church and supported Thos Cotterill’s campaign to legalise hymns in the CofE. He wrote some 400, in familiar metres, published in Cotterill’s 1819 Selection and his own Songs of Zion, 1822; Christian Psalmist, or Hymns Selected and Original, in 1825—355 texts plus 5 doxologies, with a seminal ‘Introductory Essay’ on hymnology—and Original Hymns for Public, Private and Social Devotion, 1853. 1833 saw the publication of his Royal Institution lectures on Poetry and General Literature.

In the 1825 Essay he comments on many authors, notably commending ‘the piety of Watts, the ardour of Wesley, and the tenderness of Doddridge’. Like many contemporary editors he was not averse to making textual changes in the hymns of others. He produced several books of verse, from juvenilia (aged 10–13) to Prison Amusements from York and The World before the Flood. Asked which poems would last, he said, ‘None, sir, nothing— except perhaps a few of my hymns’. He wrote that he ‘would rather be the anonymous author of a few hymns, which should thus become an imperishable inheritance to the people of God, than bequeath another epic poem to the world’ on a par with Homer, Virgil or Milton. John Ellerton called him ‘our first hymnologist’; many see him as the 19th century’s finest hymn-writer, while Julian regards his earlier work very highly, the later hymns less so. 20 of his texts including Psalm versions are in the 1916 Congregational Hymnary, and 22 in its 1951 successor Congregational Praise; there are 17 in the 1965 Anglican Hymn Book and 26 in CH. In 2004, Alan Gaunt found 64 of them in current books, and drew attention to one not in use: the vivid account of Christ’s suffering and death in The morning dawns upon the place where Jesus spent the night in prayer. See also Peter Masters in Men of Purpose (1980); Bernard Braley in Hymnwriters 3 (1991) and Alan Gaunt in HSB242 (Jan 2005). Nos.152, 197, 198, 350*, 418, 484, 507, 534, 544, 610, 612, 641, 657*, 897, 959.