Spirit divine, inspire our prayers

Andrew Reed is one of those writers who are now known almost solely for a single hymn. This is a different approach from that of 530, but like it, a careful gathering of many biblical images of the Holy Spirit. This time each one governs a stz, with prayer (‘prayers’ was an early and lasting amendment) as the controlling motif from first to last. It appeared anonymously in The Evangelical Magazine of June 1829, when Dr Reed was pastor of New Road Chapel in Whitechapel, E London. Headed ‘Hymn to the Spirit’, it had already been sung on Good Friday (17 April) of that year. The occasion was a meeting of Congregational ministers who had been summoned by Thomas Harper, as Secretary of a London ‘Board’ of such pastors, to pray for revival. The title continued, ‘Sung on the late Day appointed for solemn Prayer and Humiliation in the Eastern District of the Metropolis’. One indirect result was the start of the Congregational Union of England and Wales in 1832. 10 years after that the hymn featured in the author’s Hymn Book Supplement; only in the 1872 Wycliffe Chapel Supplement did his name appear with it. The original opening ‘… attend our prayers’ sounds today too much like summoning to a reluctant intercessor to turn up for a meeting; other changes in this (mainly) Jubilate version are at 2.1 (from ‘… to us reveal’); 3.1–3 (from ‘purge … sacrificial … soul’); 5.3 (from ‘that all of woman born …’); and 6.2 (from ‘a lost world …’). One stz, ‘Come as the dew …’, is omitted as in other books. Among other hymns by this author is Holy Ghost, with light divine, which also describes the Spirit of God in different ways and may have been in Samuel Longfellow’s mind in 1864 when he wrote the better known Holy Spirit, truth divine, with its very similar expressions

The tune BILLING is repeated at 809 and 821. It was composed for Newman’s Praise to the Holiest as an alternative to GERONTIUS, by Richard Terry, musical editor of The Westminster Hymnal where it first appeared with those words in 1912. It has since been appropriated, as in Praise!, for other hymns. Its name dates from only the 1940 edn of WH; Great and Little Billing were villages a few miles E of Northampton, now engulfed by suburbia. Billing Hall was a stately home, formerly owned by a prominent RC family but demolished in 1950. The hymn is also sung to BEATITUDO (605), ABERGELE, AYRSHIRE and EMMAUS, among other tunes.

b St Clement Danes, Middx (C London) 1787, d Cambridge Heath, Hackney, Middx (NE London) 1862. He followed his father in his London watchmaking business, studying at home until in 1807 Matthew Wilks of Moorfields Tabernacle persuaded him to train at Hackney Coll for the Congregational ministry. In 1811 he became the first Pastor of the church where he belonged, New Road Chapel in the St George’s-in-the-East district of E London. Increasing numbers led to the building of Wycliffe Chapel in nearby Commercial Road, where he remained until his retirement in 1861. He was active in establishing several institutions for orphans and the mentally ill in London and the SE, including homes and asylums at Clapton (The London Orphan Asylum), Colchester, Coulsdon, Earlswood and Putney. This often involved raising considerable sums of money; his philanthropic work was prompted partly by a visit he made to a dying man with a destitute family, and partly by his own mother’s experience growing up as an orphan and herself caring for other orphaned children. In 1817 he issued a hymn-book as a supplement to the Isaac Watts collection then in use, enlarged in 1825 and more so in 1842; 21 of his own hymns and some by his wife were first published there. When dying, he asked that his hymn written in Geneva, There is an hour when I must part, should be read to him. But the best-known of his hymns, included here, has appeared in a very wide range of protestant hymn-books. No.536.