What would you think if Henry Ford, the inventor of the assembly line, had written a small book of hymns? I don’t believe you’d ask him why he didn’t churn out more. You’d be puzzled. Writing any hymn at all isn’t what a big industrialist does. And Ford in fact did not do that. Or how about a volume called Love Poetry in the Cloud, with fifty favorite songs of love, edited by Bill Gates? Or nursery rhymes, by the last five presidents, called There Was a Crooked Man? Well, maybe there we’re on to something more likely!
But our Hymn of the Week wasn’t written by a priest or a devout poet or a doctor of divinity. Sir Robert Grant was a high official in the East India Company, and then Governor of Bombay. He had been born in India, though he was educated at Cambridge and served as a member of Parliament for many years, during which time he fought for the equal rights of Jewish citizens, and for a variety of social reforms spurred on by the evangelical wing of the Church of England. His years in Bombay were marked by a desire to get the businessmen out of the way of the missionaries, and to do right by the native peoples, building roads for their commerce and furthering measures to alleviate their poverty. The oldest medical college in Bombay, founded in 1845 by one of Grant’s associates and friends, a devout Farsi (a follower of the ancient Persian philosopher and mystic, Zoroaster), is named after Robert Grant. “The virtues of the right honorable Robert Grant,” reads his obituary in the London Morning Chronicle, “sprang from the high aim he took in all his duties to do the will of God.” Grant tackled his public duties with immense energy, and his private life, as his secretary wrote, was marked by what ought to make the greatest of men most simply beloved: “His unbounded benevolence, his sincere but unostentatious piety, his enlarged philanthropy are too well known to require the aid of my feeble pen.”
I think that if you are going to be like Sir Robert, you will have to keep in mind what our Hymn of the Week urges us to remember: God is our king, and we are “frail children of dust, and feeble as frail.” For this hymn, a revisiting of Psalm 104, is joyous and honest at once. If God turns his face from his creatures, says the Psalmist, they are troubled; if he takes away their breath, they return to the dust. But when he sends forth his spirit, “they shall be created, and thou shalt renew the face of the earth.” All that we have and all that we are depend upon God. Why, the very dust — think of the most minute of all the particles in existence, with no more infinitesimal creature intervening between them and the instant will of God — proclaims his power and his love.
And what about all the creatures of the earth, the birds and the beasts, the fish in the sea, the storm clouds and the clear sky, the dew and the rain? Sometimes, when the crazy works of political man get too much for me, I like to walk into the woods with my dog, and then the call of a cardinal or a chickadee sets me right, not just because they are lovely or cheerful, but because they are good and sweet and sane, just what they ought to be. And I am grateful for them, as I’m grateful for all the homely wonders of the world about me. It is good to have lived, if only to see the sky and the hills, the summer sun, and the full moon shining on a field of snow. And I feel then that God is nearer than the pulse of my heart. I imagine that Robert Grant often felt much the same.
O worship the King, all glorious above! O gratefully sing his power and his love! Our Shield and Defender, the Ancient of Days, Pavilioned in splendor and girded with praise. O tell of his might! O sing of his grace! Whose robe is the light, whose canopy space. His chariots of wrath the deep thunder-clouds form, And dark is his path on the wings of the storm. The earth, with its store of wonders untold, Almighty, Thy power hath founded of old, Hath stablished it fast by a changeless decree, And round it hath cast, like a mantle, the sea. Thy bountiful care what tongue can recite? It breathes in the air; it shines in the light; It streams from the hills; it descends to the plain, And sweetly distils in the dew and the rain. Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail, In thee do we trust, nor find thee to fail; Thy mercies how tender! how firm to the end! Our Maker, Defender, Redeemer, and Friend!
Sung by the Paisley Abbey Choir
Word & Song is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and on-demand access to our full archive, and may add their comments to our posts and discussions.
Dear Tony,
Wonderful hymn, wonderful information on Grant. He was obviously an Evangelical, perhaps of the
Clapham Sect, that preceded the Oxford movement/Tractarian/AngloCatholics/et al.
May I add another of your articles from Crisis, which moved me to tears: "Our unhappy Youth."
(It seemed the best way to tell you. ) For some strange reason, I find myself, from time to time, chatting with young people, who are stunned at our 65year marriage. Their response is always the
same (with a sigh) "Nothing like that can ever happen to me......(another sigh....) From the boys it's almost always about how there are "no decent girls left," from the girls, "Guys only want one thing..." Between the Media and the Culture--pretty much the same thing, n'est-ce pas? I grieve for them. What to do? I have no idea. School? So dangerous, you might as well pack a gun...They
think Church is utterly irrelevant. They simply can't imagine it. Picking up girls in bars is a bummer;
they're just sluts etc,....They have no past. History has no interest for them. After all, they'll tell you,
it isn't about them, is it? In fact, they don't believe there is anything about them. No one is interested, no one cares. As desperately as I tried, explaining that I loved him dearly, my only
grandson killed himself. His parents and sister are devastated, as you would expect. I wanted him to see a doctor. His parents ignored me,of course. What does my generation know
about anything? We've never even played a video game. But he's gone. And we pray. And pray
for him and all the other lost ones. Pessimistic about where their civilization has gone, that one we
remember, which was pulled out from under us by malevolent magicians we naively believed . So we pray for these kids because we're far too old to mount an army---unless it's an army of angels and "clouds of witnesses." I hope; and dare NEVER hope, anything less should be so important.
Please forgive me for this intrusion. kr
I remember loving to sing this when I was a kid in a Baptist congregation in Appalachia, a congregation that firmly believed in making a joyful Noise unto the Lord. I loved the sound of it (we were loud!) and also the words of it. Great good sense, and beautifully told.
Yes.