Lord, you left your throne and your kingly crown

Emily Elliott wrote this hymn as a carol for Christmas in 1864 for the choir and schools of St Mark’s Brighton. It was published the following year in Wilson’s Service of Praise, and in 1870 in the Church Missionary Juvenile Instructor which she edited. Each stz then had the same refrain, but the author introduced variations for stzs 4 and 5 in Chimes for Daily Service in 1880. In its original form, ‘There is room in my heart for thee’, it gives editors the choice of leaving it as it is, omitting the hymn, or attempting to reword it as Praise! has done. Another problem has been ‘but thy couch was the sod’ in 3.3; however many dictionaries we may appeal to, it is worse than pointless to sing words which induce only stifled mirth. In its 2004 edn, CH has ‘but the earth was the bed/ for Thy weary head’. But the ‘deserts of Galilee’ also present a problem; where are (or were) these, and what does Luke 9:58 really mean? Faced with such questions, some books omit the stz entirely; the present editors try to do justice to the thought of the original, and of the Scripture. The concept of ‘Christ in the heart’ has sometimes been used in ways which go beyond the NT, but is based on Ephesians 3:17, illustrated by Romans 8:9–11. The rest of the hymn needs little change. MARGARET was composed for the words by Timothy R Matthews, named after his wife and published in Children’s Hymns and Tunes in 1876. It has sometimes been called ELLIOTT after the author of the words. Caradog Roberts’ later tune of the same name is quite different. Although Golden Bells extended the life of Ira D Sankey’s THOU DIDST LEAVE, no other tune has seriously rivalled this one for the hymn, nor (up to 2000) had any other words been used for it.

b Brighton, Sussex 1836, d Hove, Sussex (or Islington?) 1897. Niece of Charlotte E (see above) and daughter of a vicar whose sermons dwelt much on prophecy. In 1866 she issued a small collection of hymns for her home church of St Mark Brighton. She wrote other sacred verse, supported the Mildmay Park Mission in London and for 6 years edited The Church Missionary Junior Instructor. Her hymns were published in Chimes of Consecration and their Echoes (70 hymns, 1873), Chimes for Daily Service (another 71 in 1880) and other books designed for use in hospitals and infirmaries. A section of 48 hymns from the 1880 book was issued as a cheap large-print volume called Under the Pillow. Of her 3 hymns in the 1899 Church Missionary Hymn Book, two are for use by missionaries (‘pray for us…remember us…praise for us…praise with us’ etc, and ‘we have heard…our lives we yield…we stand enrolled’); the 3rd repeats the refrain, ‘What will it be when the King comes?’. No.400.