Mighty God, while angels bless you

If the previous hymn has been more widely sung by Anglicans, this one is better known among the Free Churches. In its original form (nine 4-line stzs ending with two Hallelujahs and an Amen) it was written by Robert Robinson in 1774, headed ‘Glory to God. Christmas’. He wrote it for a small boy, Benjamin Williams, who later became a deacon of Reading’s first baptist church (from which the present Carey Baptist Church grew); line 2 was thus ‘may an infant lisp thy name?’ Intended originally for Christmas— which may indicate what that festival once stood for—it was published posthumously in Middleton’s Hymns in 1793, then in a volume of the author’s works edited by Benjamin Flower in 1807. It formerly included: ‘Did archangels sing thy coming?/ Did the shepherds learn thy lays?/ Shame would cover me ungrateful/ should my tongue refuse to praise’. In 1879 Dr Robert W Dale of Birmingham arranged the hymn in what are now its usual four 8-line stzs. ‘Lawful’ (1.8) appears in CH for ‘endless’, being in Robinson’s original; reluctantly, his ‘wings an angel’ in 2.7 is changed to ‘speeds …’; 3.2 was formerly ‘dark through brightness all along’; and lines 6 and 8 of stz 4 have been rearranged while maintaining the sense. Stz 3 line 5 refers to Hebrews 1:3 (cf 311 and 332), while line 7 was used by John R W Stott in entitling his 1967 book on evangelism ‘Our Guilty Silence’.

For the tune CORINTH/BITHYNIA by Samuel Webbe the Elder see 82, which has an alternative arrangement.

b Swaffham, Norfolk 1735, d Showell Green, nr Birmingham, Warwicks 1790. His first job was as a London barber’s apprentice, during which time he preferred his books to his business. When he was 17 he heard Geo Whitefield preach on ‘the wrath to come’; he had gone intending to mock, but was awakened and remained ‘disturbed’ and in darkness, finally finding Christian assurance after 2–3 years of struggle. In 1758 he began to preach occasionally in a Calvinistic Methodist Ch at Mildenhall, Suffolk, before founding an independent congregation at Norwich. Then for nearly 30 years, from 1761, he pastored the Stone Yard Baptist Chapel, Cambridge, having persuaded the church to agree to ‘open communion’ (that is, to all baptized Christians), while supplementing his income as a coal and corn merchant and farmer. He wrote widely, on the divinity of Christ (1776) and in the next year on The History and Mystery of Good Friday (1777) and on Baptism (A History of Baptism and Baptists, 1790). He also became a leading figure in campaigns for civil and religious liberty, the abolition of slavery, and American independence. 2 biographies (by Dyer and Wm Robinson) are thought to exaggerate the influence the Unitarians had on his later years; Jn Gadsby (1861) and others have included his story in their various compilations. He is thought to have written only 11 hymns; Grosart (in Julian) calls them ‘terse yet melodious, evangelical but not sentimental, and on the whole well wrought’. Nos.317, 894.