To the name of our salvation

We move to later medieval Lat, still anonymous, in this hymn of larger proportions duly translated for the 19th c and adapted for the 21st. From A&M onwards there has been great variation from John Mason Neale’s 1851 text in his Medieval Hymns and Sequences; EH coincides with A&M in only 5 of its 36 lines, not including even the first, and one of the 5 is in a different position! Neale says he was the first to put it into English; Wesley Milgate says, ‘Many of the other lines are hardly singable’. But the version adopted here, like all those it draws on, continues to make its subject clear. The 1496 Antwerp Breviary text is entitled ‘The Holy Name’, and the word ‘name’ occurs here 17 times in the six selected stzs. It may be seen as a further enlargement of 299, except that it does not deal with other titles but expounds the name ‘Jesus’ itself, the ‘name of our salvation’ since that is what the word means: Matthew 1:21. Stz 3 formerly began ‘’Tis the name …’, and 4, ‘’Tis the name that whoso preacheth …’ ‘Strongest comfort’ replaces ‘sweetest comfort’ (though both are true), and stz 5 has been more extensively revised. HTC, some of whose renderings are adopted here, has a more radical revision ending with ‘all our hope is in your name’.

For a spacious hymn comes one of the grandest of tunes; Henry Purcell’s WESTMINSTER ABBEY (repeated at 567) must be used sparingly if its power is not to be dissipated. With 6 stzs it must be neither dragged nor rushed; pacing it wisely can be a tall order if it is not abbreviated. The tune is an arrangement of the Alleluias at the end of the composer’s anthem O God, thou art my God, preserved in Wm Boyce’s Cathedral Music of 1760. It first appeared as a separate tune in 1843, in Vincent Novello’s The Psalmist where it was named BELVILLE and arranged by Ernest Hawkins. Though it appeared later in other hymnals, its more recent popularity stems from A&M’s Shortened Music Edn of 1939, where it is set to Blessed city, heavenly Salem. The name is a posthumous tribute to Purcell’s time as Abbey organist. ORIEL is also in wide use with the words.

b at Lamb’s Conduit St, Bloomsbury, Middx (C London) 1818, d East Grinstead, Sussex 1866. He was taught privately and at Sherborne Sch; Trinity Coll Cambridge (BA 1840), then Fellow and Tutor at Downing Coll. On 11 occasions he won the annual Seatonian Prize for a sacred poem. Ordained in 1841, he was unable to serve as incumbent of Crawley, Sussex, through ill health, and spent 3 winters in Madeira. He became Warden of Sackville Coll, E Grinstead, W Sussex, from 1846 until his death 20 years later. This was a set of private almshouses; in spite of a stormy relationship with his bishop and others over ‘high’ ritualistic practices, he developed an original and organised system of poor relief both locally and in London, through the sisterhood communities he founded.

With Thos Helmore, Neale compiled the Hymnal Noted in 1852, which did much to remove the tractarian (‘high church’) suspicion of hymns as essentially ‘nonconformist’. Among his many other writings, arising from a vast capacity for reading, was the ground-breaking History of the Eastern Church and the rediscovery and rejuvenating of old carols (collections for Christmas in 1853 and Easter the year following). His untypical, eccentric but popular item Good King Wenceslas was a target for the barbs of P Dearmer, qv, who (like others since) voiced the hope in 1928 that it ‘might be gradually dropped’.

Neale and his immediate circle had a pervasive effect on many things Anglican, including architecture, furnishing and liturgy, which has lasted until our own day. He founded and led the Camden Society and edited the journal The Ecclesiologist in order to give practical local expression to the doctrines of the Tractarians. But his greatest literary work lay in his translation of classic Gk and Lat hymns. In this he pioneered the rediscovery of some of the church’s medieval and earlier treasures, and his academic scholarship blended with his considerable and disciplined poetic gifts which showed greater fluency with the passing years. Like Chas Wesley he was an extraordinarily fast worker, given the high quality of so much of his verse. His translations from Lat, mainly 1852–65, kept the rhythm of the sources; among his original hymns (1842–66) he was critical of his own early attempts to write for children. But he considered that a text in draft should be given plenty of time to mature or be improved; he voluntarily submitted many texts to an editorial committee. Even so, some were attacked by RCs because in translation he had removed some offensive Roman doctrines; others, because they leant too far in a popish direction. His own position was made clear by such gems as, ‘We need not defend ourselves against any charge of sympathising with vulgarity in composition or Calvinism in doctrine’.

Of his final Original Sequences and Hymns (1866), many were written ‘before my illness’, some over 20 years earlier, and ‘the rest are the work of a sick bed’—JMN, writing a few days before his death. His daughter Mary assisted in collecting his work, and many of his sermons were published. He was familiar with some 20 languages, and had a notable ministry among children, writing several children’s books. He had strong views on music, and was a keen admirer of the poetry of John Keble, qv. 72 items (most of them paraphrases) are credited to him in EH, and he has always been wellrepresented in A&M, featuring 30 times in the current (2000) edn, Common Praise. Julian gives him extended treatment and notes ‘the enormous influence Dr Neale has exercised over modern hymnody’. In A G Lough’s significantly titled The Influence of John Mason Neale (1962) and Michael Chandler’s 1995 biography, while the main interest of the writers lies elsewhere, there are interesting chapters respectively on his ‘Hymns, Ballads and Carols’ and his ‘Hymns and Psalms’. What Charles Wesley was with original texts, so was Neale with translations, not least in the sense that, as a contemporary put it, ‘he was always writing’. Nos.225, 297*, 338, 346, 371*, 407, 442, 472, 567, 881, 971.