Hymn Study Reflection

8/3/2019 Hymn Study Reflection

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HYMN STUDY REFLECTION

by

Rosie Perera051657

SPIR 655: Hymns and the Christian Spirit

Bruce Hindmarsh

Regent College

August 26, 2002



Hymn: “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”

Text: Robert Robinson, 1758; appeared in his A Collection of Hymns used by the

Church of Christ in Angel Alley, Bishopgate, 1759.

Tune: NETTLETON, Traditional American melody, from Wyeth’s Repository of Sacred

Music,

Part Second , by John Wyeth, 1813.

Some of the greatest hymns in our hymnals today come from the unlikely pens of men or

women who wrote only one hymn that has stood the test of time. Often their names are not familiar

to us, even after a course on hymnody: William Ralph Featherston, a newly converted 16-year-old

(“My Jesus I Love Thee”), Folliott Sandford Pierpoint, a 29-year-old classics teacher (“For the

Beauty of the Earth”). Robert Robinson was another such author. At the time he wrote “Come Thou

Fount” (the better known of his two only hymns), Robinson was a young Methodist preacher who

had just been converted two years prior at age 20, through the preaching of George Whitefield. Such

hymnic creativity is a testimony to the deep spiritual lives of these people, the powerful preaching of

the Word of God that was heard in their day, and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit which issued forth

in a profundity that we rarely see anymore in people so young and new in the faith. It makes me

bemoan the feebleness of our current-day spiritual experience.

The text of “Come Thou Fount” has been revised and adapted by many, including Margaret

Clarkson (author of our own Regent Hymn), who changed some of the words and imagery that might

not be understood by modern biblically illiterate congregations: “praise the Mount” to “praise his

name”; “interposed” to “bought me with”; and, most significantly:

Here I raise my Ebenezer; Hitherto Thy love has blest me;

Hither by Thy grace I’ve come; Thou hast bro’t me to this place;And I hope by Thy good pleasure And I know Thy hand will bring meSafely to arrive at home. Safely home by Thy good grace.

The hymn has also had various ditsy choruses added to it during the period of the tent meeting

revivals. Before taking this class, I was always appalled at hymn books changing the words of classic

hymns, however I learned through Edmund Lorenz (whose book I read – see my reading report) and

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Mary Oyer a bit more about the process and reasoning that goes into hymn editing, and it doesn’t

bother me anymore. However, with Marva Dawn (whose book I also read) I would have to call the

above sorts of changes “dumbing down” the hymn. Nonetheless, in most cases, once changed verses

become familiar again, they continue to contribute to the tradition of the church. Witness the fact that

we know and prefer “Praise the Mount, I’m fixed upon it” to the original “...O, fix me on it.” (perhaps

because it emphasizes faith to balance all the uncertainty portrayed in the third stanza).

“Come Thou Fount” draws deeply from the fount of Scriptural allusions. The fount/river of

God, and streams of mercy, as well as significant springs of God’s blessing/provision are mentioned

in conjunction with the Garden of Eden (Gen 2:10-11), the New Jerusalem (Ezek 47, Rev 22), the

throne of God (Joel 3:18), Hagar (Gen 16:7), the Israelites in the wilderness (Num 20), etc. “Flaming

tongues above” recalls Pentecost (Acts 2). The Mount of the Lord is used throughout scripture as the

meeting place between God and his people, and the site of the Temple. The courts above anticipate

our heavenly dwelling with God (e.g., Ps 65:4; 84:2). “Ebenezer” (Heb: “stone of help”) comes from

the memorial stone that Samuel set up after God led the Israelites in defeat of the Philistines (1 Sam

7:12). “Wandering from the fold of God” employs the common biblical theme of wandering sheep

present in Isaiah 53:6, 1 Pet 2:25, and elsewhere. Jesus’ “precious blood” needs no comment. The

plea to “seal [my heart]” in the last line is reminiscent of the seal of the Holy Spirit (2 Cor 1:22, Eph

1:13; 4:30) as well as the seal of protection in Rev 7.

Our group came to the conclusion that the hymnist is writing this hymn as his Ebenezer, to

mark a point in his life where he looks back at how God rescued him from his estrangement. Yet he

knows he is still prone to wander, so he prays for God’s continued grace to bind his heart and seal it,

keep him from straying in the future, and ensure him that indeed his place in heaven is secure. The

fourth stanza, which is never sung anymore, reflects on that promised day when the Lord will come

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to take his “raptured soul away.” Given today’s errant theology of the Rapture, it is wise that we no

longer sing this verse as it would bring wrong associations to people’s minds.

“Come Thou Fount” has been set to over 45 tunes in its history, but the one we know is a

lilting melody that moves along at a sprightly pace when sung well. The words of the first verse

(“sing thy grace,” “songs of loudest praise,” “melodious sonnet”) call for a cheerful tune, and this one

is appropriate to the text. It has four segments. The first two and the last are all identical, while the

third one is quite different and more ornamented, reaching the highest note in the whole tune three

times, and holding on it the last time. This is the musical climax of the tune and draws our attention

to the third line of the text as being either somehow more significant or a source of tension. That

works well with the text, which presents to us in that third line the words “Jesus sought me when a

stranger, wandering from the fold of God” (verse 2) and “prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to

leave the God I love” (verse 3). That seems to fit with the lines which bookend the hymn text with

images of the heart. The opening line “tune my heart to sing thy grace” conveys the image of an out-

of-tune heart that needs to be brought into tune. “Here’s my heart, O, take and seal it” also has the

sense of bringing the heart back to a solid place from all its wandering. Thus those third lines about

wandering create tension in the framework of the rest of the hymn, a tension which is resolved both

musically and textually in the fourth lines: “he, to rescue me from danger, interposed his precious

blood” and “here’s my heart, O, take and seal it; seal it for thy courts above.”

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Documents

Hymn Study Reflection