Ye Holy Angels Bright

Richard Baxter, 1672, and John Hampden Gurney, 1838

The author of our Hymn of the Week, or at least of the first stanza, was quite a player in the politics and the English church of his day. His name was Richard Baxter, a man who seemed capable of putting everybody off, not because he was boorish or aggressive (he wasn’t), but because he would not go along to the bitter end with one or another form of aggression in his time. On one side, he managed to be drummed out of the Church of England, against his will, because he always held out hope for a national church that would have room for a broad range of believers, including most but not all of the “Dissenters." On the other side, Oliver Cromwell kept him at arm’s length, because Baxter did not go along with the republican ideology, but leaned toward reestablishing a monarch on England’s throne. He writes, with a kind of jocular acerbity, about a certain sect similar to the Quakers, led by a Dr. Pordage, “who wrote a book to vindicate himself, in which he professeth himself to have communication with Angels, and to know by sights and smells, etc., good spirits from bad.” But he also understood that the angels, incorporeal beings created by God, might in fact by God’s command have to do with man, as when the angels swept up Elijah bodily from the earth, without the intervention of death. This was “most miraculous indeed; a most instructive instance of majestic Providence every way.”

We have reduced angels to wispy feminine forms, so much so that if somebody says of a little boy that he is “a perfect angel,” we give the lad a second look to make sure he hasn’t tied a rattle to the cat’s tail or something; and we half hope that he does that sort of thing. We don’t mean that the little boy is a pure intellectual substance, a soul of such power as to seem to inhabit a dimension beyond our own. He isn’t. None of us is. Yet even our own souls, as I’ve suggested, are mysteries to us. The body is a wonderful creature; the mind is potentially infinite, always ready to seize upon a new thing; but the very being of a person, the essence, the core — who can understand it?

In this hymn, as in Psalm 148, on which it is based, we move from stanza to stanza in calling upon one choir of beings after another to praise God. In the first, we call upon “ye holy angels bright,” then in the second, “ye blessed souls at rest,” that is, those who have gone before us and now stand in the presence of God, and then in the third, “ye saints who toil below,” that is, all souls on earth, still toiling in the vineyard, still running the race of faith, still contending for the truth. All these are to be united in one grand choir. Who is left? No one, really, except now we concentrate on one soul alone, namely, our soul. “My soul, bear thou thy part,” says the poet. We shouldn’t think about this in too simple a way. He means more than, “Now I am going to join in the singing.” The soul, the individual soul, has a part that is its own. If I might stretch a point here: imagine a choir of countless voices, not reduced to unison, but singing in a harmony whereof our choirs are but whispers and a stray note here and there. Thomas Tallis wrote a motet, Spem in alium, for forty voices, meaning forty separate polyphonic parts, not always singing the same syllable at the same time. Imagine now a motet of billions of souls, each singing its own part, with the result not chaos or cacophony but harmony so complex and so moving that you could never come to an end of its glory.

One final thing about our hymn: I love the meter; it is swift, surprising, and climactic, perfect for the sense of the poem. John Darwall, the composer, who set to soprano and bass melodies all 150 of the English-ed psalms by Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady, outdid himself with the soaring melody, which ends on high notes in lines 1, 5, and 8, and which rises step by step in 6 and 7. Often, hymns with short lines compensate for it by slow, solemn melodies: think of the passiontide hymn Ah, Holy Jesus. But you can’t do that for short lines in an eight-line stanza, because otherwise things would just slog along. Yet you do want all the lines to hold together. What the melody does is to race through the middle lines of the second part, lines 6 and 7, rhyming with each other but treated as if they were one line of eight ascending notes, all equal, so that when the eighth line comes, rhyming with line 5, it will also “rhyme” in melody and in those notes held up high. Lift up your hearts, then!

Click on the image above to hear a beautiful choral and congregational rendition of today’s hymn.

Ye holy angels bright,
Who wait at God's right hand,
Or through the realms of light
Fly at your Lord's command,
Assist our song,
For else the theme
Too high doth seem
For mortal tongue.

Ye blessèd souls at rest,
Who ran this earthly race,
And now, from sin released,
Behold the Savior's face,
His praises sound,
As in his sight
With sweet delight
Ye do abound.

Ye saints, who toil below,
Adore your heavenly King,
And onward as ye go
Some joyful anthem sing;
Take what he gives
And praise him still,
Through good and ill,
Who ever lives.

My soul, bear thou thy part,
Triumph in God above,
And with a well-tuned heart
Sing thou the songs of love;
Let all thy days
Till life shall end,
Whate'er he send,
Be filled with praise.