May the mind of Christ my Saviour

While this hymn by ‘Katie’ Barclay Wilkinson belongs unmistakably to a particular spiritual tradition of both Christian service and Victorian/post- Victorian hymnwriting, it is understandably acclaimed as one of the most useful, effective and enduring of its kind. It is rich in phrases from the Epistles: ‘The mind of Christ’ is found in 1 Corinthians 2:16; the indwelling ‘word of God’ in Colossians 3:16; ‘the peace of God’ in Philippians 4:7 and Colossians 3:15; ‘the love of [Jesus] Christ’ in Ephesians 3:19. If these are the primary references of stzs 1–4, the remaining two draw on Hebrews 12.1–2 and 1 Corinthians 9:19–24. What strikes later readers, as it would have done the early Christians, is that these words addressed to the body of believers in the church (at Philippi, Colosse etc) are here given an individual application—‘I/me/my’ throughout. The text has been listed as c1912, though its first known appearance in print was in the 1925 Golden Bells. The HTC editors in 1982 wrestled with some of the more dated expressions, and their lines are adopted here at 3.2–4 (from ‘rule my life in everything/ that I may be calm to comfort/ sick and sorrowing’). Smaller changes original to Praise! come at 5.3 (from ‘looking only unto …’) and 6.3 (from ‘forget the channel’). Whether the channel/servant should be entirely forgotten is arguable in view of 2 Corinthians 4:5, not to mention much else in this and other letters. The Jubilate text makes other changes at 2.1, omits stz 5, and renders 6.2–4 as ‘… to make him known;/ so that all may look to Jesus,/ seeing him alone’; a change which removes the false rhyme ‘win/him’ which Praise! reluctantly but authentically retains. Some hymnals, possibly to avoid having to resolve such questions, omit this final stz. The tune ST LEONARDS has almost invariably been used with the words and no others. Arthur Cyril Barham-Gould composed it for them at his home at the seaside town of St Leonards in Sussex, probably for their appearance in GB where his tune was also first published.

b Timperley, nr Altrincham, Ches (Gtr Manchester) 1859, d Kensington, Middx (W London) 1928. She lived and worked in W London, belonged to the CofE, and among her parish church’s activities she led meetings for girls and young women. She was also associated with the Keswick Convention. Her engineer husband Frederick Barclay Wilkinson survived her by some 9 years. She is known almost entirely through one distinctive hymn which features in many evangelical books, though it did not reach the definitive ‘Keswick’ repertoire until Keswick Praise in 1975. In 2000 she broke posthumously into the A&M corpus for the first time, with a place in Common Praise. No.810.