The sands of time are sinking

‘… And the stretching out of his wings will fill the breadth of your land, O Immanuel’ (Isaiah 8:8). ‘Immanuel’s land’ is a phrase taken up by other writers including John Bunyan; Watts has ‘Immanuel’s ground’ in 794, and in Scripture it follows the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 fulfilled in Matthew 1:23. But among hymns which have endured, only this one is actually structured on the phrase. In Isaiah it marks not blessing but ruin; the wings are Assyrian, and ‘There was nothing now for Immanuel to inherit except suffering and loss’—J A Motyer. Anne Ross Cousin’s hymn merely hints at the cost of the ultimate glory. She wrote her lines in the Free Church of Scotland manse at Irvine in N Ayrshire overlooking the Firth of Clyde, where her husband ministered. They were based on the writings of Samuel Rutherford (or Rutherfurd, notably from a letter to Lady Kenmure) and published in The Christian Treasury of 1857. The full 19 stzs, with their local references to Anwoth, Rutherford’s home and pastorate, were later printed as The Last Words of Samuel Rutherfordand reprinted with his letters, most recently in 2006. The hymn was a favourite of D L Moody and featured among the last words of C H Spurgeon, who chose to sing it. The hymn was among the last words of C H Spurgeon, which he chose to sing not long before his death in 1892. It does not win a place in Ian Bradley’s ’100 Victorian hymns that should be in any self-respecting modern hymnal’; but Erik Routley wrote in 1979 that here ‘we have a warmth and vision that are from beginning to end strictly Scottish. Anyone who can read stanzas 2 and 4 unmoved has no soul for prayer.’ The divided opinions the hymn produces may well be due, as so often, to a reluctance to modify; many editors feel that its Victorian features are untouchable and therefore no longer singable. With some trepidation, therefore Praise! has ventured to adjust the text.

The 7th line of the first 4 stzs ended ‘… glory dwelleth’; the phrase is unchanged in stz 5, and 6.7 had ‘dwelling’, the form now used earlier and therefore varied here. 1.6 had ‘dayspring’ (Luke 1.78 AV). At 2.5 ‘all the ransomed’ is truer to Revelation 14:1–4 than ‘his fair army’, and 3.1 read ‘O Christ! he is the fountain’. 4.3–4 had ‘… aye the dews … / were lustred …’; 5.6, ‘piercèd hand’; 6.2 ‘’gainst’ and 6.5, ‘amid the shades of evening.’ For those as yet unable or unwilling to part with the evocative RUTHERFORD, named but not composed for this hymn, it is available at 907. But Victor Day’s WOODBRIDGE is a worthy contemporary partner for the words. He composed it at his home in Ipswich in Nov 1998, naming it after the Suffolk town a few miles to the NE. It is first published here.

(née Cundell), b Kingston-upon-Hull, Yorks 1824, d Edinburgh 1906. A gifted musician and linguist, she was the daughter of a Episcopalian doctor, who in 1847 became a Free Ch minister’s wife, first in Melrose in the Scottish Borders and then at Irvine nr Kilmarnock. A keen student of the work of Samuel Rutherford (qv), she has been dubbed ‘a Scottish Christina Rossetti with a more pronounced Theology’—quoted by Cliff Knight. Writing in Julian, James Mearns (of Whitchurch, Reading, and the Dictionary’s asst editor) calls many of her 107 or so hymns ‘very beautiful’ but adds that some are meditations rather than congregational texts. Others have repeated that judgement; contemporaries testified to her ‘deep piety and gracious character’. Some of her work appeared in The Christian Treasury in 1857, and in Immanuel’s Land and Other Pieces. The latter was credited in 1876 simply to ‘A.R.C.’ and contained 114 items including a tribute to Sir John Simpson, the pioneer of chloroform; a ‘New and Revised Edition’ (undated, but 1880 or later), this time by ‘A.R.Cousin’, omitted this and other more personal pieces. A fine piece on Naomi (‘Call me not Naomi, call me Mara!’) is headed ‘Reverses’; Some books shorten her most noted hymn by starting at stz 3; still relatively new, it was also the last one announced by C H Spurgeon just before his death in Mentone. Another striking text full of ‘thee/me’ contrasts is O Christ, what burdens bowed thy head. No.909.

b Nisbet, nr Jedburgh, SE Scotland (Border), c1600, d Scotland 1661. Edinburgh Univ 1617–1621; he was indebted to the Presbyterian minister at Crailing who was deposed in 1617 for attacking royal interference with the church. While serving as the university’s Regent of Humanity he fathered a child out of wedlock, and being dismissed for immorality; he was penitent but offered himself next for pastoral ministry. As minister at Anwoth in Galloway he won a reputation as a tireless pastor, rising at 3.0 and active in preaching, teaching, visiting, and radical political campaigning. With equal zeal he attacked both Arminianism and corruption in the church, and justified separatist ‘conventicles’. As a result he was again dismissed, and while under house arrest and/or prison in Aberdeen in 1637–38 wrote hundreds of letters to all kinds of recipients throughout Scotland, many of which were preserved, subsequently printed and reached Christian classic status (further reprinted in 1984). In 1638 the signing of the National Covenant enabled him to Anwoth, and a year later to become Prof of New College, St Andrews, where he set about overturning the Episcopalian system. From 1643 to 1647 he was in London as a Scots representative at the Westminster Assembly of divines, and in 1644 wrote Lex, Rex (Law, King), justifying armed resistance to Charles I. His hope of advancing English Presbyterianism was frustrated by divisions and hyper-separatists in the capital, but he wrote further polemics against Independency, Erastianism (state control of the church) and New England Congregationalism in N America. He strongly urged the justice of Protestant coercion of recalcitrant rebels. Back in Scotland, by now pessimistic about England but a revered figure at home, he chose to remain at St Andrews to advance the ongoing Scots Reformation. After the execution of Charles I, the next Charles was obliged to hear an impassioned address by Rutherford on the duty of kings, on his visit to Scotland in 1650. The defeat of the Covenanters by Cromwell at Dunbar that year provoked new church divisions in which Rutherford’s stricter policy lost him friends. In 1660 he suffered another dismissal and house arrest; charged with treason, he avoided appearing before Parliament only by serious illness and death, in 1661. At least 80 edns of his letters have appeared, highly regarded by Baxter and Spurgeon (both qv) among others. Many of his sermons were also published, and Lex, Rex, burned in 1660, came to be seen as a politically liberal manifesto defending civil disobedience in a godly cause, and praised by Francis Schaeffer in 1981. Rutherford House was established in 1983 to promote Reformed theology worldwide from its Scottish base. His name features in hymn-books through the use made of his work by Ann Cousin, qv; recent studies include Faith Cook’s Samuel Rutherford and his Friends. No.909.