You holy angels bright

As with 196 and 199, this hymn is a classic but much-edited text wedded to its now ‘natural’ tune, and one in which several hands have had a share. As it stands in Praise! it presents 4 stzs, each of their 8 lines with its rhyming partner, addressed rhetorically to angels, departed believers, believers on earth, and myself—‘my soul’. Stz 2 carries no suggestion that we are communicating directly with departed Christians, any more than with angels in stz 1 or the worldwide church in stz 3. This text shows some changes from the commonly accepted 19th-c version, mainly in stz 2 which formerly concluded (with a false rhyme) ‘as in his light/with sweet delight/ye do abound’; and stz 4, starting ‘My soul, bear thou thy part’, and ending ‘Let all thy days/till life shall end/whate’er he send/be filled with praise’. But consistently with editorial policy, the 1st word also moved from ‘Ye’ to ‘You’. This growing practice, reflected by cross-referencing in the Index, has a drawback in that ‘You + noun’ in normal usage often has a critical edge which ‘ye’ lacks. Revisers of hymns have sometimes found ways round the problem, but often have to accept it and hope that with time the awkwardness will fade. The changes outlined so far are those adopted by HTC and followed here. But the ‘standard’ text which was its base, used with small variations in many 20th-c hymnals, is further removed from the original than from any later modernising.

Richard Baxter’s The Poor Man’s Family Book (from 1674, a time of much opposition to his Kidderminster ministry) featured 16 stzs entitled ‘A Psalm of Praise, To the Tune of Psalm 148’. The opening 5 stzs are headed respectively ‘Angels’ (Ye holy angels bright), ‘The glorified saints’, ‘The world’ (‘All nations of the earth’), ‘The Church’ (‘Sing forth Jehovah’s praise’) and ‘My soul’. It does not seem to have been used publicly until 1838, when John Gurney selected and adapted 8 of Baxter’s stzs as two separate hymns, in a Collection of Hymns for Public Worship. His changes included 1.5–8, where Baxter’s ‘You there so nigh/fitter than we/dark Sinners be/for things so high’ became the familiar lines retained here. A further complication (if such it is) comes in 1862, when Richard Chope’s Congregational Hymn and Tune Book introduced a further selection including (for the first time) the lines beginning ‘Ye saints who toil below’. So Chope (probably) and Gurney (certainly) should be named in a full ascription of authorship. The textual history would fill at least a booklet; a recent and accessible summary is found in the 1999 Companion to Rejoice and Sing (125).

DARWALL’S 148TH, also used for 548 but not featured in the Psalms section, is the finest and virtually the only surviving work by John Darwall of Walsall. He composed tunes for all 150 Psalms; this appeared in the 1770 New Universal Psalmodist of Aaron Williams, set to the Tate and Brady version of Psalm 148, Ye boundless realms of joy. John Wilson’s posthumously printed monograph for the Hymn Society, John Darwall and the 148th Metre (2002) is a detailed and joyful celebration of his tune, which Linda Mawson has arranged for the present book. CH2004 edn uses the tune 4 times. Whatever else of Baxter we have lost, we join most of the saints who serve (or toil) below in retaining his opening line and structure, and the finest possible music for his words.

b Rowton, High Ercall, Shrops 1615; d Charterhouse Liberty, Middlesex (London) 1691. Donnington Free Sch, Wroxeter, and private tuition at Ludlow. After a brief time at court he studied theology at home while working on his father’s estate, until becoming master of Dudley Grammar Sch. In 1638 he was ordained, serving first at Bridgnorth (Shrops) and from 1641 at nearby Kidderminster (Worcs). A puritan within the Church of England, he became one of Cromwell’s chaplains but then defended the monarchy against those he saw as usurpers. The Lord Protector, he felt, was too much a Lord, too little a Protector. Later, as chaplain to Chas II, he refused the bishopric of Hereford. In 1662 he left the CofE ministry and was licensed as a Nonconformist minister from 1671. He suffered much harassment, culminating in 18 months’ imprisonment under Judge Jeffreys. But from the Toleration Act of 1689 onwards he was left in peace, and continued preaching and writing for his brief remaining time, earning him the nickname ‘Scribbling Dick’. Baxter also defended church music against some puritan opponents; it is odd to find some 18th-c worthies deriding his friends or successors as ‘Baxterians’ while gladly singing the hymns of Watts and Wesley.

Among some 250 publications were the popular but searching The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, or, a Treatise of the blessed State of the Saints in their Enjoyment of God in Heaven (1649); his ministerial manual The Reformed Pastor (Gildas Salvianus, 1656); and A Call to the Unconverted (1658)—all of which have been frequently reprinted. An ‘abridged and rewritten’ version of the 2nd of these was prepared by Stuart Owen in 1997 with an added 55-page biography, entitled The Ministry We Need. The 3rd was ordered by Samuel Johnson from his bookseller, and when (in 1783) Boswell asked him which of Baxter’s works he should read, the doctor replied, ‘Read any of them; they are all good’. Among others commending Baxter are Doddridge, the Wesleys, Samuel Rutherford, Francis Asbury, Thos Chalmers and Spurgeon; more recently John T Wilkinson has introduced an edited Reformed Pastor (1939) with a 33-page essay; N H Keeble edited Baxter’s autobiography in 1974, and wrote Richard Baxter, Puritan man of Letters, in 1982. His keenest modern admirer James I Packer contributes the feature on him for the 2003 Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals, and several other articles elsewhere; Baxter, says JIP, ‘filled the parish church with over half the population twice a Sunday, saw hundreds of conversions, established family devotions in most homes, nurtured his young people, trained layfolk as witnesses and prayer warriors and, with the help of an assistant, gave every family two separate hours of catechising each year, using the Westminster Shorter Catechism.’ H M Gwatkin said that Baxter and Geo Herbert were ‘the two great model pastors of the 17th century’. Perhaps most remarkably for his time, in confronting the facts of the appalling cruelties of slavery and indeed the institution itself, he enquired in 1673, ‘How cursed a crime it is to equal men to beasts. Is this not your practice? Do you not buy them and use them merely as you do horses to labour for your commodity… Do you not see how you reproach and condemn yourselves while you vilify them as savages?’ It was also Baxter who wrote most quotably (and understandably, given his history) that ‘I preached as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men.’

But since RB is rarely remembered as a hymnwriter, the treatment of hymns is minimal in or absent from the biographies. His own Saints’ Rest reminds us that ‘Those who have been with us in persecution and prison, shall be with us also in that place of consolation. How oft have our groans made, as it were, one sound; our tears, one stream; and our desires, one prayer! But now all our praises shall make up one melody’. He adds, ‘Be much in the angelical work of praise…The liveliest emblem of heaven that I know upon earth is, when the people of God, in the deep sense of his excellency and bounty, from hearts abounding with love and joy, join together both in heart and voice, in the cheerful and melodious singing of his praises’. Nos.202*, 590, 764.

GURNEY, John Hampden, b Serjeants’ Inn, off Fleet St, London 1802, d St Marylebone, Middlesex (London) 1862. Trinity Coll Cambridge (BA 1824); abandoned law studies in order to be ordained (CofE) 1827. After a curacy at Lutterworth, Leics (a parish made famous by John Wyclif), he became Rector of St Mary’s Bryanston Sq (Marylebone), nr Marble Arch in central London; later, a Prebendary of St Paul’s Cathedral. He was active in support of the Religious Tract Soc and SPCK; the author of several historical works and at least three collections of hymns for the parishes he served, with essays on hymnody and psalmody. One, published in 1851 with 300 hymns, became known as The Marylebone Collection. He wrote 17 original texts, one of which (with variations) has proved of lasting value. Nos.202*, 406.