We love the great hymns, don’t we? But the words, or lyrics, of hymns are poetry. And poetry is sometimes difficult to understand. So often people sing the words of a hymn for years and love those words, but they don’t fully understand them. As an English professor I encounter this problem many times with many people—including myself! So in GREAT HYMN! WHAT’S IT MEAN? We’ll look at short phrases of great hymns and together we can figure out their meaning and understand them better and therefore love the hymns even more.

Night snow

We’ll start with “Silent Night.” This hymn was written in the German language and later translated into English, and when that happens there is often a further difficulty. Let’s look at the first two groups of words:

Silent night, holy night!

This group of words is actually an independent unit, a kind of exclamation, and stand by themselves. But most word groups in hymns are sentences: you start with the first word, usually capitalized, find the subject and the verb, and read until you get to the period or question mark or other end punctuation mark such as these: . ; : ? !

So the next sentence is

All is calm, all is bright; [A]Round yon[der] virgin and child.

Here’s where the confusion often comes in. Because we all pause for breath after the word “bright” we tend to disconnect the first line from the second. Actually then, the sentence stars with “All” and ends with “child” and reads “All is calm and bright around the virgin and child over yonder.”

Bethlehem, Israel, from Tantur

More next blog.

An abandoned factory by a now-clean stream is about as good a symbol of the former days of Hebden Bridge [England] as you’ll find, I suppose. It looks like something out of Dickens: monotonous rows of windows that were inserted, not for aesthetics, but for light enough for workers to do their equally monotonous jobs. This is Yorkshire, where the skies are gray and the moors are bleak and Emily Bronte wrote her morose Wuthering Heights.

Abandoned factory in Hebden Bridge

Fortunately, I guess, the artists came over the last decade or two, so now this factory town is something of an art haven. Up the hill is Wainsgate Church, where John Fawcett was the preacher when he wrote “Blest Be the Tie.” You probably know the story, and I’ll talk about that in another blog. But for now, let’s be aware that not all English hymns were written around green pastures dotted by sheep. It’s kind of bleak here, but a preacher came to bring hope and good news.

John and Charles Wesley were two of eighteen children born to their parents, so I suppose finding a way to make yourself stand out was even more of a challenge than with most of us with siblings. Still, they didn’t have much trouble. John’s indomitable will and apparent leadership skills caused him to excel inevitably, especially after he and Charles came to Oxford. The Wesley rooms in Lincoln College breathe his presence.

John also influenced Charles to go on the not-so-successful journey to America for mission work. They didn’t stay long and returned to England. Charles kept on following his brother, though, which led him to settle with John in Bristol and buy a house there for the family. This was not far from New Room, which John built for his school, for worship, and for a meeting place for Methodist ministers.

One of the most intriguing features of the large meeting room is the pulpit, or more accurately the pulpits. There are two, one behind and higher than the other. This arrangement allowed both brothers to do what they did best. John preached from the higher one (naturally), but Charles had his opportunity to sing from the lower. Many of the great hymns that he composed (hymns like “A Charge to Keep I Have,” Christ the Lord is Risen Today,” “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” “Hark,! The Herald Angels Sing”) were first led from this pulpit. It’s rare that you can find an exact spot where history was made, but that approximately six feet of space is one of the great places in hymnody.

Philip Doddridge, author of “O Happy Day,” set the standard for industry and toughness. He got up every morning at 5:00, and at least one of his students must have gotten up then too, because Philip had a student read to him while he was shaving so as not to waste time. I’m doing well to get up by 6:30 and listen to the Today show while munching through a bowl of shredded wheat.

My father was a preacher, and we lived on a modest level while I was growing up. But I was the only child at home during those years: my brother and sister were grown and married. Life was not that hard for me. Philip was the twentieth child of his parents, and only he and one sister survived past childhood. He later recalled how his mother taught him Bible stories from the pictures on the blue-and-white Dutch tiles of the fireplace. Both parents were dead by the time he was thirteen, and an appointed guardian wasted what little inheritance he was supposed to get. That’s an ordeal I never came close to having to face.

Still, Philip performed so well at the Dissenting Academy at Kibworth in Leicestershire that when the headmaster died he was asked to become headmaster himself. That started him on a brilliant but demanding career as educator and preacher.

I’ve found that people raised in fairly comfortable circumstances are still often hard workers and quite disciplined. But I must recognize that a hard life surely produced a tireless and impressive man in Philip. Doing hard work on the farm and working your way through school are not the only keys to success, but I’ll grant that in many cases like Philip’s they may have been better than today’s computer at age twelve and a car at age sixteen.

One of the phenomena associated with going to world-famous places or the sites of world-famous elements like the great hymns is that when you get there, the place seems so, well, unfamous.

Broadhembury, England

Broadhembury is quaint and charming, but so are a lot of English villages. What make this one famous is its association with Augustus Toplady, composer of “Rock of Ages.”

Broadhembury Church

Somehow you expect the place associated with a hymn you’ve sung all your life to be, well, spectacular somehow. Not so this little church. Augustus may have composed his hymn in the cleft of a rock in nearby Cheddar Gorge. Or it may have been born out of his feud with John Wesley.

Whatever, the whole fame thing is comfortably mollified by a sign on the front of the church :

Welcome to St. Andrews Church, Broadhembury.

Please close the door on entering and leaving.

Birds fly in the Church and cannot get out.

Thank You.

Have a safte journey home.

Most famous people and their homes are pretty ordinary after all.

Broadhembury residence

Winchester College is one of my favorite hymn site destinations because it offers a tourist-free look at a school emerging from time. Notice please that this is Winchester College, not Winchester Cathedral from the song title or adjacent Winchester University, stately as it is.

The college was founded by wealthy William Wykham in 1382 for poor boys. It’s still running just fine, probably better than ever after a few centuries of establishing wealthy and famous alumni. Each year for hundreds of years the school has produced its group of carefully cultured and trained young men.

Inevitably some of these have become quite famous. One is Thomas Ken, author of “Holy, Holy, Holy,” who was director of the chorus in the middle seventeenth century during the Puritan Interregnum. A highlight of my visit is holding a small seal given Thomas that once belonged to acclaimed minister and poet John Donne.

Winchester College

One of the neatest experiences of visiting Winchester, though, is walking around the dining room. The paneled walls and tables, the portraits, the grey-clad hostesses—all make it look like we’re at Harry Potter’s Hogwarts. Head master Dumbledore or Professor Snape could stroll in any minute.

Things don’t change much at Winchester College. They’re not supposed to, and they sure don’t need to.

Most of the classic hymns were written by men, usually Anglican or Dissenter preachers. Of the relatively few women, some leaned toward the independent side.

Frances Havergal, composer of “I Gave My Life for Thee” and “Take My Life and Let it Be,” was consistently devout, and she just as consistently dismissed anything that would interfere with her Bible study, evangelism, and hymn writing. An attractive woman from a well-to-do family, she received several offers of marriage, but she declined them all in order to keep herself undistracted from her church work. Evidently she excluded domestic distractions, as well. An anonymous booklet about her found in the public library of her home town of Stourport, possibly written by her sister, reads “She probably never did a household chore in her life, and took no apparent interest in anything that was going on in the world apart from saving souls for Christ.”

Sarah Flower Adams, writer of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” was the daughter of a liberal newspaper editor, a romantic poet, a beautiful woman, an actress, and a very independent lady. She was involved in political and social issues and belonged to William Johnson Fox’s Unitarian South Place Chapel in Finsbury Circus, London. She was married to William Bridges Adams, but their agreement was that she would not do housework.

How this mindset of these two ladies affected the content of their hymns might be worthy of study.

I like hiking and rocks as much as the next man, so Cheddar Gorge near Broadhembury, County Devon, England is appealing. Look closely and you can see mountain goats with hooves clinging precariously to the sides of near-cliffs. Helmeted rock climbers clamber over ledges, and the whole area looks like the American West’s version of wilderness.

In the midst of all this natural beauty is the most famous rock of all, the one that supposedly Augustus Toplady took shelter in sometime around 1776 when a storm caught him and his horse. The story goes that he found shelter in a slanting cleft in this 100-foot mass of stone during a rain storm. He there related the stone to the reference to Christ as the Rock (1 Corinthians 10:4) and the cleft to Jesus’ wound from which issued blood and water (John 19:34)) Hence he conceived the idea of his hymn, “Rock of Ages.” Supposedly he found a playing card there on which to jot down his original idea.

The story is questionable, but possible. More likely August conceived “Rock of Ages” as a vehicle for advancing his belief in grace that opposed his antagonist John Wesley. Nonetheless, we enjoy the scene and the ambience. Jill stands by the cleft to give perspective as I take some pictures. Meanwhile Paul is taking the photos that really count. I reflect that preachers and hymn writers of the era were both hardy and original.

The afternoon in 2006 when we reached Lower Brixham on the coast of Devon, the sea was quiet and calm. We drove to Berry Head, now a hotel. Built as a hospital but never used as one, it was where Henry Lyte lived for 23 years as the rector of the town’s All-Saints Church.

By the time we checked in the afternoon was getting late, so Jill and Paul and I went out to watch the sunset and take some pictures. Berry Head is on Torbay (p. 20 in the book) and is a gorgeous setting as you face west.

Brixham is pretty far south, and—contrary to what people would expect—palm trees grown here. Next to one tree is a bench facing west, and today there was a solitary man sitting there watching the sun drop over the shore across the bay. He had his legs crossed, and one arm was draped over the back of the bench.

Paul went behind the bench to shoot a picture while we watched. As nearly as I could tell, the man never knew about that shot. Now his picture (page 20 again) is in 10,000 books distributed from America to Australia. I wonder if he’s ever seen it and now knows that his image has become one of the favored pictures in the primary photographic book on British hymns?

Even hymn sites have their ghost stories. The supposed specter resident at Lew Trenchard, home of Sabine Baring-Gould, is Margaret. She was a family member a couple of centuries back known for her acerbic nature and generally bad attitude. No danger, just grumpy.

Story goes a couple and their little girl were staying at the now hotel when the child wandered into the hall and saw an old lady. “Who are you!?” the woman said. When the child asked back, “Who are you?” Margaret disappeared.

There’s a story, too, about a servant feeling someone was watching her as she crossed the courtyard. When she turned around, an old woman was watching her from a window, but vanished.

And the top tale is that someone opened Margaret’s crypt in Sabine’s church one day: Margaret is said to have raised herself up and said “Go away!”

Like all ghost stories—apocryphal (not the only hymn site story that is), but intriguing.