My God, I thank you that you made

Although Adelaide Procter became a Roman Catholic when she was 26, this hymn from Legends and Lyrics, published some years later in 1858, is selected mainly by editors of evangelical hymnals. It certainly expresses a truth of experience rarely found in hymns or prayers; J R Watson comments that it ‘improves as it goes on’. The 6 stzs on p207 (there is no 1st-line index) come between ‘Phantoms’ and ‘Homesickness’, and are headed ‘Thankfulness’. Apart from some small adjustments for the sake of rhythm, and the omission of the original stz 4 (‘For thou who knowest, Lord, how soon …’), the main changes here are in the final lines. These formerly ended ‘… nor ever shall, until they lean/ on Jesu’s breast.’ This is not a posture or an ambition which Scripture appears to encourage, so the lines have been rearranged (not without difficulty) while the main thought is retained in its almost Augustinian simplicity: ‘Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.’ Janet Wootton comments on other attitudes and editorial changes to the hymn in This is Our Song (2010), pp137–138.

Frederick Maker’s tune WENTWORTH (apparently named from Wentworth house in Yorks which at least two of the Wesleys visited) was composed for these words and appeared in the 1876 Bristol Tune Book. There (but hardly ever elsewhere) line 1 is made plural: ‘Our God, we thank thee …’ Since then no other tune has come near to displacing it.

b Bedford Sq, Bloomsbury, central London 1825, d St Marylebone, London 1864. She grew up in a literary household and circle of friends; her first poems were published (under the name ‘Mary Berwick’) in Household Words and All the Year Round by Dickens, who also admired her work with many of London’s homeless and distressed people. Her verses ‘The Lost Chord’, set to music, became an immensely popular Victorian ballad, still well-known enough to be comically satirised (by Jimmy Durante) and seriously criticised (by Charles Cleall) in the mid-20th cent. She was also gifted in music, languages, and drawing. She became a Roman Catholic in 1851 and published Legends and Lyrics: a Book of Verse in 1858, enlarged 1862, for which her friend Dickens later added a warm Introduction; she worked, he said, ‘with a flushed eagerness that disregarded season, weather, time of day or night, food, rest’. A Chaplet of Verse (also 1862) was sold in aid of the Providence Row Night Refuge for Homeless Women and Children. Her death, preceded by 15 months of illness, was almost certainly hastened by her tireless social and compassionate work. In her 1998 biography The Life and Work of Adelaide Procter, Gill Gregory describes her as a Victorian woman who slowly moved from the position of dutiful daughter and retiring, ladylike poetess to that of a woman who challenged mid-Victorian mores and conventions and championed the cause of single and homeless women.’ No.209.