Rector’s Reflections
Thursday 7th November 2024
Thy Kingdom Come, O God
In yesterday’s reflections, I introduced the subject of the current series of reflections, and referred to the hymn which starts, “Thy Kingdom Come, O God”. Today I am going to look at this hymn in more detail.
This hymn was written back in the 19th century, and was first published in 1867, in a collection of hymns entitled Hymns for the Minor Sundays from Advent to Whitsuntide. It was written by a Hertfordshire parish priest , Revd Lewis Hensley (1824-1905). Hensley had been educated at Trinity College, Cambridge , and had become a fellow of his college. He might easily have spent the rest of his life as a Don, but he felt a call to parish ministry. His area of expertise lay in mathematics rather than theology, but this did not prevent him from writing a whole series of hymns. Although he was not an academic theologian, he had a good knowledge of the bible – and there is an argument for saying that this is what counts when it comes to writing hymns.
The majority of Hensley’s hymns are no longer sung today – indeed, how often were they sung in his own day? Were they even sung in his own parishes? But one of his hymns, the one we are considering today, has certainly stood the test of time.
In its original version, the hymn reads as follows:
Thy Kingdom come, O God;
Thy rule, O Christ, begin;
Break with Thine iron rod
The tyrannies of sin.
Here is Thy reign of peace
And purity and love?
When shall all hatred cease,
As in the realms above?
When comes the promised time
That war shall be no more,
And list, oppression, crime,
Shall flee thy face before?
We pray Thee, Lord, arise,
And come in Thy great might:
Revive our longing eyes,
Which languish for Thy sight.
Men scorn Thy sacred Name,
And wolves devour Thy fold;
By many deeds of shame
We learn that love grows cold.
O’er heathen lands afar
Thick darkness broodeth yet;
Arise, O Morning Star,
Arise, and never set.
The version of this hymn usually sung today has two alterations to the original text. The verse starting, “Men scorn Thy sacred Name” is omitted in its entirety, and the reference to “heathen lands afar” has been changed to “lands both near and far”; this omission of the reference to “heathen lands afar” seems to have been made c.1951. It is interesting to note that a reference to “heathen lands afar” was thought to have been inappropriate or unhelpful even as far back as the early 1950s.
Hensley’s hymn is an expression of what a Victorian parish priest thought the Kingdom of God might look like. Hensley was writing in the heyday of the British Empire, and some 50 years before the horrors of the 1st World War. And yet his words still seem relevant to us today. We shall look at this in more detail in tomorrow’s reflections.