Your Kingdom come, O God

The 3-word petition from the prayer ‘Our Father …’ (Matthew 6:10, Luke 11:2) provides the opening for two (by now) traditional hymns. One was by the American Unitarian F L Hosmer in 1891; but Lewis Hensley’s came first and has proved more durable and universal, being also the one text of his which has survived. He wrote it in 1867 as an Advent hymn, and published it that year in Hymns for Minor Sundays from Advent to Whitsunday. Almost immediately it entered A&M, but remained largely within Anglican books until 1933. Stz 5 formerly began ‘Men scorn thy sacred name’; 3.4 was ‘shall flee thy face before?’; and 6.2 had ‘broodeth’. Although some books (GH, MP) are still printing the original 6.1, ‘O’er heathen lands afar’, more realistic replacements are already over 50 years old, beginning with The BBC Hymn Book of 1951. The present 3.4 and 6.1–2 are as in HTC and other books; Rejoice and Sing has ‘shall spoil the earth no more’ at 3.4.

The tune ST CECILIA was set to these words from the first appearance in A&M (the 1868 Appendix) and has hardly ever been challenged. But Leighton Hayne had launched it 5 years earlier in The Merton Tune Book: A Collection of Hymn Tunes used in the Church of St John Baptist, Oxford, Compiled by the Rev H W Sargent, MA. Edited and Arranged by the Rev L G Hayne. It was set there to Thy way, not mine, O Lord (874), and has also been borrowed for other hymns, coming three times, for instance, in Rejoice and Sing. Cecilia, martyred in the 2nd or 3rd cent, is known as the ‘patron saint’ of music.

b Bloomsbury, Middx (C London) 1824, d Great Ryburgh, nr Fakenham, Norfolk 1905. Trinity Coll Cambridge (Prizeman, BA, MA); Fellow and Asst Tutor at the College, ordained in 1851. After a curacy at Upton-with-Chalvey in rural Bucks and a brief ministry at the uniquely-styled St-Ippolyts-with-Great-Wymondley, Herts, he became Vicar of nearby Hitchin, Herts, and remained there for some 49 years until his sudden death while on a train journey. He was made an Hon Canon of St Albans in 1881. In addition to his Household Devotions and Shorter Household Devotions (the second in response to comments on the first?), he published two collections of hymns, both closely matched with the Sundays of the church’s calendar, in 1864 and 1867. Only one (from the second of these) has lasted well, with slight modifications as in Praise!, but this is in numerous hymn-books including all edns of A&M from 1868 to 2000. No.513.