Rebuke me not in anger, Lord

An agonized Psalm from one who feels outcast, deserted, tortured and derided, this has similarities with both 6 and 39. The 3rd of the 7 ‘penitential’ Psalms, it was paraphrased by David Preston in the early 1990s and is first published here. It began as an adaptation of Isaac Watts’ Amidst thy wrath, remember love (‘Guilt of conscience and relief’, his sole attempt at this Psalm), but little trace now remains of its origin.

KINGSFOLD is a CMD tune much in recent demand but included only here in the present book. Its place in hymnals can be traced to Ralph Vaughan Williams’ first encounter with it at Kingsfold, a village near Horsham, W Sussex, in 1904. He set it to I heard the voice of Jesus say in EH, which proved an enduring partnership. Erik Routley discusses the melody and its variants in The English Carol (1958) pp94–96. It was apparently ‘noted down’ by Alfred J Hipkins in Westminster, London, and printed in English County Songs edited by Lucy Broadwood and J A Fuller-Maitland in 1893. There it was set to a ballad ‘Dives and Lazarus’, a connection maintained by Vaughan Williams in his 1939 arrangement for strings and harp in Five Variants on Dives and Lazarus. The melody is also found set to a carol called ‘Job’, touching on the same theme and recalling both Job and Lazarus (Come, all you worthy Christian men); and in the Irish ‘Star of the County Down’, subsequently arranged by Benjamin Britten. It is also recognisable as THE RED BARN, and a Scots tune GILDEROY is clearly related; W Chappell’s Popular Music of the Olden Time, 1855–59, includes a similar one for ‘We are poor frozen-out gardeners’.

b London 1939. d 2020. Archbishop Tenison’s Grammar School, Kennington, London; Keble College Oxford (MA Mod Langs.) He worked as a French Teacher, including 11 years at Ahmadu Bello Univ, Nigeria, and gained a PhD on the French Christian poet Pierre Emmanuel (1916 84). A member of Carey Baptist Ch, Reading, for many years, he later moved to Alweston, nr Sherborne, Dorset. He compiled The Book of Praises (Carey Publications, Liverpool) in 1987, with versions of 71 Psalms; these include modified texts of Watts and a few other classic paraphrasers, but most are by contemporary writers including himself. 60 of his metrical Psalm versions are so far published, including one each in Sing Glory (2000), the Scottish Church Hymnary 4th Edn (2005) and Sing Praise (2010), and 3 in the 2004 edn of CH; also 10 tunes. His writing and composing has taken place in Leicester, Reading, Nigeria and his present home; he was a member of the editorial board throughout the preparation of Praise! and had a major share in the choice of music for the Psalm texts (1-150). His convictions about the Psalms, as expressed in the Introduction to BP, are that ‘There is nothing to compare with their blend of the subjective and the objective, the inner life and practical goodness, the knowledge of one’s own rebellious heart and the knowledge of God…Today’s general neglect of congregational Psalm singing is a symptom of the spiritual malaise of our churches. When the preaching of the Gospel has prospered, bringing into being churches vibrant with spiritual life, men and women have taken great delight in praising their Maker and Redeemer through these scriptural hymns’. 15 of his own, self-selected, feature as his share of ‘contemporary hymns’ in the 2009 Come Celebrate; he has also served as a meticulous proof-reader. Nos.1, 2A, 5*, 6, 7, 11, 15, 16, 17, 19A, 24A, 27A, 30B, 32*, 33*, 38, 40, 42, 43, 47, 51*, 52, 55, 57*, 64, 66, 74, 76, 77, 84, 90, 91A, 96*, 97, 99, 100B, 101, 114*, 120, 126, 132, 139, 142*, 143, 145A, 147*, 824*, 830*, 963*.