Take up your cross, the Saviour said

Like 824, Charles W Everest’s hymn on discipleship begins with a quotation from Jesus found in more than one Gospel. Written in 1833, it was published that year in the young author’s Visions of Death, and Other Poems, featuring in a hymnal first in Union Hymns (Philadelphia 1835). This and 678 were the only American hymns included in the first A&M in 1861. That book, like most others, admitted that several of the original expressions were ‘somewhat altered’, and adds its own rather lame and anticlimactic doxology. Lines in Praise! which are substantially different are 1.3 (for ‘… with willing heart’); 2.2 (‘… thy weak spirit with …’); stz 3 (‘… nor heed the shame,/ and let thy foolish pride be still;/ the Lord refused not e’en to die/ upon a cross,/ on Calvary’s hill’; 4.2,4 (‘… sin’s wild deluge … / and point to glory o’er the grave’); and 5.1,3 (‘… follow on/ … for only he …’) Some of these changes are common to other books; the insertion of ‘Christ’ at 5.1 is more significant than it may seem, since it was after Simon Peter’s confession of Christ at Caesarea Philippi that the Saviour began to speak of taking up a cross (Mark 8:27–35). This is not the bearing of inevitable minor inconveniences but the road to a terrible death.

For BRESLAU, the expected tune in most books since the 1889 A&M, see 15. Michael Brierley’s angular 1960 tune CRANTOCK made an impact at the time but has not been widely used since.

b East Windsor, Connecticut, USA 1814, d Waterbury, Conn 1877. Trinity Coll, Hartford, Conn (MA). He published Visions of Death, and Other Poems, which included the hymn-text for which he is best known, when he was 19. Ordained in 1845 in the Protestant Episcopal Ch, he served as rector at Hamden, nr New Haven, Conn, from 1842 to 1873. He also ran a school and worked for the Society for the Increase of the Ministry. As a hymnwriter he became one of only two Americans whose work featured in the first (1861) A&M, the other being G W Doane qv. No.852.