THE STORY OF THE HYMNS AND THEIR WRITERS 97
the edge of which, on a strip of brass, is the petition of the Litany which he loved, By Thine Agony and bloody sweat ; by Thy Cross and Passion ; by Thy precious Death and Burial ; by Thy glorious Resurrection and Ascension ; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost : Good Lord, deliver us.
Keble s delightful simplicity is illustrated by the story of a visit he paid with a brother clergyman to a Sunday school. The superintendent begged him to speak to the scholars. Keble asked, May they sing something ? and when they finished, he beamed on them and said, My dear children, you sing most beautifully in tune ; may your whole lives be equally in tune, and then you will sing with the angels in heaven.
A heathen once said to Rabbi Meir, "How can your God, whose majesty, you say, fills the universe, speak from between the two staves of the Ark of the Sanctuary ? " Then the Rabbi held up a large and a small mirror to the man s gaze ; in each of them his person was reflected. " Now," said the sage, " in each mirror your body corresponds to the size of the glass ; and should the same be impossible to God? The world is His large mirror, and the Sanctuary is His small one. : "
Hymn 86. The Lord s my Shepherd, I ll not want.
Scottish Version, 1650.
This is based on the version by Francis Rous, who was born at Halton, Cornwall, in 1579, educated at Oxford, studied law, and sat as M.P. for Truro in the reigns of James I and Charles I. He was Provost of Eton College in 1643. He vvas a member of Cromwell s Privy Council, of his Board of Triers, and of the Westminster Assembly. He died at Acton in 1659, and was buried in Eton College Chapel. His amended Old Version, in which this appeared, was issued in 1641. He took his text largely from William Whittingham s The Lord is only my Support in One andFiftie Psalmes of David, Geneva, 1556. Whittingham married Calvin s sister at Geneva, succeeded Knox as pastor of the English congregation there, became Dean of Durham in 1563, and died in 1579. The Scottish Psalter version has two lines of Whittingham, seven of Rous, and others from the Westminster Assembly s revision of Whittingham. In Scotland it is the first religious verse learnt at the mother s knee, and often the last repeated before entering " the valley of the shadow of death. "
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