I have a question for you. Can you recite the second stanza of Robert Robinson’s ageless hymn, “Come Thou Fount”? I will get you started, and you see if you can get through all eight lines of the poem. Here is your clue:
“Here I raise mine Ebenezer …
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Outstanding essay! It is well-timed here, since I had just written the weekly “Hymn Note” for our bulletin on this very hymn. Thanks to your essay, I’ve refined it a bit. Very likely this will now be the topic of my lesson at our next Communion Service, too. May all this fruit from your labor be an encouragement to you, my friend. Thank you!
Excellent article! I agree wholeheartedly with both the specific outrage of the rewriting of this and other stately, meaningful old hymns, and with the concern over the widespread forgetfulness and ignorance rampant in the church at large. My small efforts to reverse this trend are encouraged by yours.
Well, I feel much the same. And I agree that the 1973 rewrite does have the definite effect of sucking much of the impact out of the version found in most 20th-C hymnals before then.
Unfortunately for any appeal to originality, the version you and I learned is itself a rewrite, and the version I often confuse it with is a choral arrangement based on that rewrite. The original has the “Ebenezer” in the middle of a stanza (at the beginning of what feels to me like a chorus, though it doesn’t repeat like a typical refrain).
the venerable ancient Cyberhymnal has the original: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/c/o/comethou.htm
Dr. Hirt explained that verse to us in class. Even though I grew up in a KJV only, independent fundamental baptist church, I had to go to IJS to learn about a hymn I had been singing since I was a kid. Surprisingly it had nothing to do with Charles Dickens!
I do wish our church would sing more hymns but I think they have been relegated to Wednesday night services…if at all.