every Sunday. He therefore made a collection of 98 hymns, including 57 composed by himself and another 13 by his friend H. H. Milman, a distinguished church historian who eventually became Dean of St Paul’s and is best remembered for his Palm Sunday hymn ‘Ride on, ride on, in majesty’. The remainder included the work of some of the greatest English poets, but neither the Bishop of London nor the Archbishop of Canterbury was willing to authorize the book’s use and its editor never saw it in print. Of his own hymns, it is hard to imagine any hymn book lacking ‘Holy, holy, holy’ or ‘Brightest and best of the sons of the morning’ or ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains’, though the use of this last hymn is now problematical.
A decisive factor in the overcoming of episcopal opposition was the work of a number of Oxford Movement scholars who demonstrated that hymns, far from being a recent Methodist invention, went back to some of the church’s earliest liturgies and played an important part in the worship and devotion of the medieval church.
John Mason Neale
Chief among these scholars and an adornment of the Victorian church was John Mason Neale, whose translations from Greek and Latin and own compositions contributed 72 items – one-tenth of the whole – to The English Hymnal and brought enrichment to Anglican worship everywhere.
He was born in 1818, his father, an evangelical clergyman, being also a brilliant mathematician and a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. John, having lost his father when he was only five, went as a scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, and became the best Classic of his year. Following ordination, he stayed on as chaplain and assistant tutor of Downing College and won many prizes for poetry. He also came under the influence of a High Church movement, parallel to the developing Oxford Movement, and in 1839, in company with two undergraduates, founded the Cambridge Camden Society (later renamed the Ecclesiological Society), to be concerned with Tractarian worship. In 1841 a periodical, The Ecclesiologist, began publication in order to demonstrate the implications of the new movement for church architecture. For better or (almost certainly) worse this had immense influence, leading among other things to the placing of choirs in chancels. The aim was to restore the ceremonial and vesture of medieval times, together with early Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony.
In 1842 Neale began work as a curate in Guildford (then in Winchester Diocese) but Bishop Charles Sumner, an evangelical, refused to license him because of his high church views, and it was left to the Bishop of Chichester to present him to the small living of Crawley in Sussex. Ill health, however, precluded his taking this up and during the next three years he divided his time between Penzance and Madeira. On his return to Sussex in 1846 he became Warden of Sackville College, East Grinstead – a charity home for 30 people. The buildings were badly dilapidated and he took the opportunity to rebuild the chapel, furnishing it according to Camden Society principle. The bishop denounced this as ‘frippery’ and ‘spiritual haberdashery’, but, since the chapel was outside his jurisdiction, he could do no more than inhibit Neale from ministering in the diocese. This inhibition remained in force for the next 16 years until Bishop Samuel Wilberforce persuaded his episcopal colleague to revoke it. Thereafter bishop and warden got on rather well.
In any case, Neale had many other interests to occupy his time. He founded a religious order for women, the Society of St Margaret, which began as a nursing order but quickly extended to include an orphanage, a girls’ boarding school and a home ‘for the reformation of fallen women’. Its work continues in a modified form today, with outposts in London, Sri Lanka and Boston, USA. With a wife and five children to support, his income of £30 p.a. needed considerable augmentation and from 1851–53 he employed his literary skill and encyclopaedic knowledge in the writing of three leading articles a week for the Morning Chronicle. He spoke 20 languages and an extraordinary number of books came from his pen on church history, liturgy, patristics, the Eastern Church, and children’s interests.
But his chief life’s work – he died when only 48 – was the recovery and translation of hymns from the past for which his scholarship, linguistic skill and poetic gift perfectly equipped him. A steady stream of work, including hymns of his own composition, became available – hymns chiefly medieval on the Joys and Glories of Paradise (1865), Hymns for Use during the Cattle Plague (1866), The Invalid’s Hymn Book (1866) and, most notably, Hymns Noted, which appeared in two parts in 1851 and 1854 and was a joint enterprise for which Neale translated 94 items from Greek and medieval Latin, while Thomas Helmore adapted their original Sarum plainsong melodies. One-eighth of the contents of the first edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern were provided by Neale, from either translations or his own writing, and he edited two volumes of carols for Christmas (1853) and Eastertide (1854). Hymns of the Eastern Church appeared in 1862.
Among the best known of Neale’s hymns (from translation) are ‘Ye Choirs of new Jerusalem’, ‘The Day of Resurrection’, ‘Christ is made the sure Foundation’, ‘All glory, laud and honour’, and ‘O what their joy and their glory must be’; while among his own work ‘O happy band of pilgrims’ remains the most widely used.
H. F. Lyte
It would be a foolhardy editor who left out H. F. Lyte’s ‘Abide with me’ from a new hymn book in any part of the English-speaking world. Although written nearly 200 years ago in a pre-modern world, it retains its power to cross every sort of social and cultural frontier and if not at the top of the favourite hymn charts, which it usually is, it is never far below.
In 1927 the organizers of the FA Cup Final decided, with the strong approval of King George V, that ‘Abide with me’ would provide a fitting climax to the community singing that preceded the kick-off. This decision was, obviously, not based on any theological ground but informed by an awareness that this particular hymn had in a unique way entered deeply into the emotional, if not the overtly religious, consciousness of the nation.
This was probably caused by the comforting reassurance offered by its words, and these were perfectly complemented and reinforced by William Henry Monk’s tune ‘Eventide’. Long before the 1927 Cup Final, ‘Abide with me’ had been sung at countless bedsides of the dying and at even more funerals. And in a world frequently devastated by war it was the one hymn known and valued by those serving at the front line or on a sinking ship, or held in a prisoner-of-war camp. The heroine nurse Edith Cavell and an army chaplain sang ‘Abide with me’ together in her cell before she was shot by the Germans in 1915.
The words were inspired by Luke 24.29, where during the evening of the first Easter Day the disciples, accompanied by the incognito Jesus on a journey to Emmaus, invited him to spend the night in their home: ‘Abide with us; for it is toward evening and the day is far spent.’ Its author was only 27 when as a young curate he heard a dying friend repeat the phrase ‘Abide with me’. This led him to compose some verses on this theme which he kept to himself until shortly before his own death in 1847 when he gave the manuscript to a relative who got them published soon afterwards. The original version had three additional verses, 3–5, which were subsequently omitted from most hymn books, not because there was anything amiss with them but, presumably, because they lifted the emphasis from the deathbed to continuing daily life.
Lyte, the son of a naval captain, was born in Scotland in 1793 but soon moved with his family to Ireland. At Trinity College, Dublin, he won poetry prizes in three successive years. He intended to become a doctor, but changed his mind and, following ordination, became curate of a parish near Wexford. Ill-health caused him to resign and he lived for a time in the more hospitable climate of Marazion in Cornwall, where he married the heiress of a rich Irish clergyman.
On recovery of his health he became a curate at Lymington in Hampshire, then at Charlton in Devon, before becoming vicar of the new parish of Lower Brixham, also in Devon, where he remained for 25 years. He was, however, frequently beset by ill-health, requiring many foreign tours, and only two months after his resignation from Brixham he died of tuberculosis in Nice. Aided doubtless by the wealth of his wife, he accumulated a considerable library
