We come before our Fathers' God

It is striking that an almost indelibly Anglican ‘anthem’ should be followed immediately here by one with an equally firm Free Church pedigree; only for the CofE to resurface at 579! Thomas Hornblower Gill is now remembered mainly for this one hymn of the many he wrote. Its beginning grew from Psalm 90:1, Psalm 44 and Psalm 95 also being in evidence and God as our ‘habitation’ at Psalm 71:3 and Psalm 91:9. Its heading was ‘The People of God’ and its origin unusually specific. ‘The birthday of this hymn, November 22, 1868 (St Cecilia’s Day), was almost the most delightful day of my life. Its production employed the whole day and was a prolonged rapture.’ This was a rainy Sunday; the writing, says its author, was prompted ‘by a lively delight in my Puritan and Presbyterian forefathers of East Worcestershire. Descended from a Moravian martyr and an ejected minister, I rejoice not a
little in the godly Protestant stock from which I spring. A staff handed down from him, and inscribed with the date 1692, was in my hand when I began the hymn’ (from his Golden Chain of Praise Hymns, 1869, as quoted in the 1953 Companion to Congregational Praise). He added that it was written ‘just in time to be a link’ in the chain, the last of its 165 texts.

Routley called this ‘a sturdy hymn for occasions when history is being celebrated’; R W Dale of Birmingham was more enthusiastic in his praise. Originally there were 7 stzs, of which 2 and 5 are usually omitted, as here. The text then began ‘We come unto … / their Rock is our salvation’; stz 2 had ‘… still goeth bright before us/ is still high holden o’er us /doth vanquish, doth restore us’; 3 had ‘The cleaving sins … / the tears that from their eyes did flow/ fall fast, our shame confessing; and 5.5 read ‘… the same dear dwelling-place’. These changes are original to Praise!; Rejoice and Sing also alters 1.1 to ‘… our faithful God’, not only for gender-inclusiveness but for those ‘whose experience of God has come about in spite of, rather than because of, their ancestral past’.

This text has long been associated with LUTHER’S HYMN (29), and more recently with Kenneth Finlay’s IRVINE WATERSIDE, 1951. But the Anglican Joseph Barnby composed THE GOLDEN CHAIN (named from Gill’s book) for the words while Director of Music at Eton College; it appeared with them in the 1887 Congregational Church Hymnary and some subsequent Free Church books.

b Bristol Rd, Birmingham 1819, d Grove Park, SE London 1906. King Edward’s Grammar Sch, Birmingham. Prevented from attending Oxford Univ by the Unitarian family faith (formerly Presbyterian) which he then shared, he was nourished on Watts, largely self-taught, and later associated with and eventually joined the evangelical Anglicans. He seems to have moved nearer to their doctrinal position, paradoxically, by his love for the hymns of Isaac Watts and his study of the Gk NT. Later, however, he dubbed himself an ‘Emersonian Puritan’, a reference to the American Ralph W Emerson. He began writing verse early. Birmingham’s noted preacher-theologian Dr R W Dale thought him the finest hymnwriter of his generation, including 39 of his hymns in his English Hymn Book of 1874 compiled for Carrs Lane Chapel where Gill often attended. Others allowed him to be at least the leading Free Church writer of his time. He wrote some 200 texts, some of which have been variously compared to those of G Wither, J Mason and even C Wesley; they proved popular in N America, but Anglicans have been slower to recognise their value. There are none in A&M (except for the 1904 edn), EH or the 1965 Anglican Hymn Book, but 5 feature in the 1962 Baptist Hymn Book and 4 in the URC’s Rejoice and Sing (1991). He began writing verse early; among his published works were The Fortunes of Faith (1841), The Golden Chain of Praise (in 1869, with 165 of his texts, enlarged 1894) and Songs of the Spirit (1871). His life overlapped that of Rosamond Herklots (qv) by 9 months, each having a home at Grove Park in SE London. No.578.