Walk in the light, and you shall know

The last hymn in this section 8g on ‘Holiness’ completes a quartet of Scripture-rooted texts, of which this is by far the oldest. Each of Bernard Barton’s stzs uses four words from 1 John 1:7 and explores their consequences; it is didactic in the sense of 815, but with promise predominating over warning. The ‘inner light’ was a watchword for the early members of the Society of Friends, sometimes as a healthy corrective to formalism; but here the author, known as the Quaker poet, sets the ‘light’ imagery in the specific context of Scripture and the atonement. His text appeared in Devotional Verses founded on Select Texts of Scripture, published in 1826. Some books have omitted stz 3; others print it as the 2nd. Changes here come in 3.2 (from ‘shall ne’er defile again’); 5.1–2 (‘… e’en the tomb/ no fearful shade shall wear’); and 6.1,3 (‘… thine shall be/ … for God, by grace, shall dwell in thee’).

This is the 3rd use of Richard Terry’s tune BILLING, for which see notes to 536; both that text and 509 employ the imagery of light. Other tunes in use include WEST BURN (520) and STÖRL, named from its 18th-c composer.

b Middlesex 1784, d Woodbridge, Suffolk 1849. (His birthplace has sometimes been given as Carlisle, but that seems to be a mistake.) In any event the family, members of the Society of Friends, moved to Suffolk while he was a boy, and he attended the Quaker school at Ipswich. He worked as an apprentice shop assistant at Halstead (Essex), a coal and corn merchant in Woodbridge, and a private tutor before embarking on a long banking career at Woodbridge in 1810. His 8 poetry collections appeared from 1812 onwards, until Household Verses in his last year; Lamb, Byron, Southey and Scott were among his friends, and Edward Fitzgerald (whose letters to BB were later published) became his son-inlaw. A man famed for his meticulous punctuality, kindly nature and lively conversation, he was awarded a state pension of £100 a year in 1841 on the recommendation of Sir Robert Peel. In 1850 his daughter edited his Memoirs, Letters and Poems. Unitarians have warmed to Barton’s hymns, and N American Quakers have traditionally sung more than their British counterparts, who only after his death began to publish and sing hymns and then usually outside their Sunday meetings. Evangelical editors have also valued his best work. Nos.550, 821.