God, that Madest Earth and Heaven ("All Through the Night")

Reginald Heber, 1827 and Richard Whateley, 1855

Years ago, when my daughter was a teenager, she joined a Swedish women’s choir, which had been founded as the auxiliary to the men’s choir, at that time the longest-lived men’s choir in the United States. It folded some time ago, because they couldn’t get young men to join. The women’s choir soon followed. Yet there had been a long tradition of Swedish choirs, and I got to know a lot of the singers, both the men and the women, very well. There is something soul-stirring in song, not just in listening but in raising your voice in melody and harmony, and it binds people together as very little else outside of a church will do — though most of the participants were church-goers in fact. It is hard to explain to people now just how widespread singing used to be. We have, for example, a Community Sing Book printed in Canada around 1900 and falling apart from much use of old, with anthems both patriotic and sacred, hymns, silly songs, love songs, classical music, folk music, everything. People didn’t consume music, then. They made it, or they heard it made in their presence.

That’s why I am glad to know that Welsh male choirs are still going strong, and it’s the Welsh who have probably, in relation to their numbers, given us more splendid melodies for our hymns than any other English-speaking people. Our Hymn of the Week is for the evening, as befits the week’s word, darkness, but you may know its melody as a wonderfully sweet and soft lullaby, “All Through the Night.” That’s an exact translation of the Welsh title, Ar Hyd y Nos (pronounce it AR HEED UH NOHSS). If I gave you the Welsh words to the original song, your English-scanning eyes would be dazed, what with dd (pronounced th as in this) and ch (pronounced like German ch in Nacht) and the vowel w (pronounced like a markedly rounded oo) and ll (pronounced as an l but with the vocal cords silent, so that it sounds like a strange thl as in athlete, but as a single consonant, not two). Here’s what the old Welsh folk song means:

All the stars a-twinkle say,
All through the night,
“This is the way to glory,”
All through the night.
All other light is darkness,
For showing true beauty
And the family of heaven at peace,
All through the night.

O how gladly smiles the star,
All through the night,
To shine upon her earthly sister,
All through the night.
Old age is night when trouble comes,
But to make man lovely in his evening hour,
We each will bring what feeble light we have,
All through the night.

Isn’t that fine? And you can imagine men singing it, too, because it isn’t simply pretty. It takes on old age, bravely, but not alone. Why, I think that the promise at the end, that we’ll unite what candles we have, so that no old man or woman need waste away in the darkness alone, is mighty comforting. Yet you can see also how the song — especially, when you hear the melody, with the four long notes repeated, in a rising sequence, all through the night — would make a wonderful lullaby for children, as it makes for us today a beautiful hymn of confidence and hope.

The principal author, Reginald Heber, was a man of letters, a tireless missionary to India, a saintly Christian bishop, and a poet of insight and tender feeling. When he was still a teenager at Oxford, he won a prize for his long poem Palestine, which Sir Walter Scott had read to him at breakfast in his rooms there, delighted with the young man’s accomplishment. Well might he be delighted. The poem both mourns the wasteland that Palestine had become, and looks forward in prayer to a time beyond the darkness:

And shall not Israel’s sons exulting come,
Hail the glad beam, and claim their ancient home?
On David’s throne shall David’s offspring reign,
And the dry bones be warm with life again.

But to our hymn! The poet says, rightly, that God is the maker not only of light but of darkness, by which we must mean not the pure absence of light, but a realm of rest, silence, sleep, and earthly peace. In the City of God above, there is no need for sun or moon, for the Lamb is himself the light; but here, God has set day and night for man as for labor and rest, and labor is good, because it shares in God’s creative power. Yet we seek protection when we sleep, as then we are vulnerable, not only to alarms and assaults, to fire and flood, but to evil suggestions, bad dreams, strange fears, and so on. And there will come an evening to each of us, when we most need the protection of God. The hymn does not shy away from that time. Peace, blessed peace — not the absence of war, but a wellspring of life; and we will open our eyes, and we will be like Him, because we will see Him as He is.

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Today we have an old recording by The Trinity Choir of St. Paul’s Chapel.

God, that madest earth and heaven,
Darkness and light,
Who the day for toil hast given,
For rest the night:
May thine angel guards defend us,
Slumber sweet thy mercy send us,
Holy dreams and hopes attend us,
This livelong night.

Guard us waking, guard us sleeping,
And, when we die,
May we in thy mighty keeping
All peaceful lie:
And when death to life shall wake us,
Thou wilt in thy likeness make us,
Then to reign in glory take us,
With thee on high.

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