1 66 THE METHODIST HYMN-BOOK ILLUSTRATED
7 b. The mountain dews shall nourish
A seed in weakness sown, Whose fruit shall spread and flourish And shake like Lebanon.
The original of ver. 2, line 7, reads, Whose souls in misery dying ; and that of ver. 6, line 8, His name, what is it ? love. Montgomery altered it to That name to us is Love. The great improvement in Hymns Ancient and Modern, His changeless name of Love, is said to be due to Keble.
Written for a Christmas Ode sung at a Moravian settlement, Christmas, 1821. On January 9, 1822, it was sent in MS. to Mr. George Bennett, then on a mission tour in the South Seas. The following April Montgomery himself repeated it at a missionary meeting in Pitt Street Chapel, Liverpool, at which Adam Clarke presided. The Doctor claimed it for his Commentary, then on the eve of publication. In May it appeared in the Evan gelical Magazine, entitled Imitation of the 72nd Psalm, Tune Culmstock. The Dictionary of Hymnology says, Of all Montgomery s renderings and imitations of the Psalms this is the finest. It forms a rich and splendid Messianic hymn. Its success has been great, partly due at the first to the publicity given to it by Dr. Adam Clarke in his Commentary on the Bible, in which it appeared in 1822 with a special note at the end of his exposition of Psalm Ixxii. :
I need not tell the intelligent reader that he has seized the spirit, and exhibited some of the principal beauties, of the Hebrew bard ; though (to use his own words in a letter to me) his "hand trembled to touch the harp of Zion." I take the liberty here to register a wish, which I have strongly expressed to himself, that he would favour the Church of God with a metrical version of the whole book.
Dr. A. E. Gregory describes it as an unsurpassed rendering of a triumphant Messianic psalm.
Hymn 207. All hail the power of Jesu s name.
EDWARD PERRONET (1726-92).
The first verse is given in the Gospel Magazine, November, 1779, with the tune Shrubsole, written for it in the organ gallery of Canter bury Cathedral by Shrubsole, a young man of twenty, who had been a chorister there. The tune was afterwards known as Miles Lane, from the Independent Chapel in London where Shrubsole was organist.
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