18a Praise, My Sou,l the King of Heaven

Hymns of the Faith

“Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven”

Psalm 103

A Presentation of First Presbyterian Church

Jackson, Mississippi

With

Dr. Ligon Duncan, Dr. Derek Thomas, and Dr. Bill Wymond

Dr. Wymond: Good morning! This is “Hymns of the Faith,” brought to you by Jackson’s First Presbyterian Church. The minister of the First Presbyterian Church is Dr. Ligon Duncan. Stay tuned for “Hymns of the Faith.”….. Here with “Hymns of the Faith” is Dr. Ligon Duncan.

Dr. Duncan: Thanks, Bill Wymond! This is Ligon Duncan, along with Derek Thomas, and the three of us are discussing hymns of the faith. We gather Lord’s Day after Lord’s Day to reflect upon this treasury of devotional truth that has been passed down from century to century over two millennia of Christianity and has given us this wonderful repository of devotional expression in worship in our English hymnal. And today we’re looking at one of the great hymns in the English language, written by one of the great hymn writers in the English language: Henry Lyte’s marvelous rendering of Psalm 103, Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven.

This hymn is always ranked among the best. I’ve seen in Anglican hymnody this ranked among the three best hymns ever. Henry Lyte, of course, is the author of the hymn that our friend Brister Ware loves to quote: “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide,” one of the great evening hymns ever written. And it’s not just an evening hymn, it’s a dying hymn, and there’s a story that goes behind it. But I’m delighted to be here with you today, Bill and Derek, talking about Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven. Derek, do you want to tell us a little bit about Henry Lyte—this marvelous, marvelous writer of hymns?

Dr. Thomas: Well, he was from Northern Ireland (but then, of course, it would just have been Ireland), the son of Captain Thomas Lyte, and educated in Portora (which is known to me) at the Royal School of Enniskillen, which isn’t more than an hour’s drive from Belfast.

Dr. Duncan: …Where you spent almost eighteen years of ministry.

Dr. Thomas: Correct. And then he went, as good Anglicans did, to Trinity College, Dublin, and graduated in 1814, distinguishing himself by gaining the English Prize Poem on three occasions. At one time he intended studying medicine, but abandoned that for theology and took holy orders (as it was called in 1815), his first curacy being in the neighborhood of Dublin in Wexford. And then he moves to Cornwall in 1817, two years later. But it was actually in 1818 – so he’s been in the ministry for three, four years or so – that he undergoes this great spiritual change. He is one of these individuals, I suppose like Wesley, and Thomas Chalmers, and Thomas Charles of Ballar, who are in the ministry but who evidently are not converted.

Dr. Duncan: We could mention that there are a variety of reasons why that happens. One is that in this time period the ministry was a very honored and esteemed profession. It was something that you thought about doing just like you thought about going into law or going into medicine, and very often second and third sons would consider the ministry as a very comfortable career to pursue. And so the very social status of it made it attractive, no matter what your own spiritual inclinations might have been.

Dr. Thomas: Right. And especially if you were given to literary abilities…and one thinks of Jane Austen’s novels and some of the weird and cranky ministers she has in her novels! But very erudite, very literary, whose sermons are very, very literary in their style.

Dr. Duncan: So you get a man like Thomas Chalmers, for instance, who is an outstanding mathematician, and he’s the minister in a tiny little parish, Kilman, and he’s just a few miles from the University at St. Andrew’s, and all week long he’s really thinking about mathematics. In fact, he’s teaching some courses in mathematics. And then he goes through an experience of almost dying, and in the course of that comes the faith in Christ. And something like this happens to Henry Lyte, is that what…?

Dr. Thomas: Yes, 1818. A friend, a brother clergyman dies, and Lyte says of him,

“He died happy under the belief that though he had deeply erred, there was One whose death and sufferings would atone for his delinquencies and be accepted for all that he had incurred.”

And then he adds about himself,

“I was greatly affected by the whole matter, and brought to look at life and its issue with a different eye than before. I began to study my Bible and preach in another manner than I had previously done.”

A couple of years…well, it’s just the next year, 1819, he writes a book, Tales On the Lord’s Prayer, and then in 1823, he’s appointed Perpetual Curate of Lower Brixham in Devon. (I have no idea what a “Perpetual Curate” is! Sounds like a sentence! [Laughter] I have no idea what that means!)

Dr. Duncan: Don’t you love these Anglican titles? They have the best titles!

Dr. Thomas: Well, I remember a friend of mine once…a dear friend of mine, the father of one of my best friends in all the world, was made a Propendary, and he called me up. He was all very excited, and he said (he was a minister in the Church of England…well, Church of Ireland, but the Anglican Communion), and he said, “I’ve just heard by the Bishop that I’ve been made a Prependary!”

Dr. Duncan: A Prependary?

Dr. Thomas: Well, a Propendary is what he called it! And I said, “What is that?” And he tried to explain to me, but at the end the only thing I could gain from it was that he had a higher salary! [Laughter] That’s all I understood of what it meant!

Dr. Duncan: Now, Henry Francis Lyte has given us some outstanding hymns over the course of his writing.

Dr. Thomas: Well, I’m not going to read them to you, but I have a list here: 81 renditions of the Psalms. But obviously he put the Psalms (a bit like Isaac Watts) into verse, and we might say “Christianized” the Psalms like Isaac Watts did.

Dr. Duncan: Bill Wymond, this tune…we actually in our congregation sing this text to two different tunes, and both of them are wonderful tunes. Maybe not everyone in the listening audience will immediately know LAUDA ANIMA, the tune to this song, so maybe let’s hear it. And tell us a little bit about this tune after you play it. [Dr. Wymond plays.]

Dr. Thomas: It’s one of those tunes that makes you immediately feel as though you’re in church! You’re transported into church, into….

Dr. Duncan: And as pedestrian as AURELIA, which we talked about not long ago, this one has…I mean, it can soar. This is a really…the tune is evocative.

Dr. Wymond: This tune is “cathedral-esque” to me. I see St. Paul’s Cathedral when I hear this tune. It is so dignified and majestic, and very strong, actually. Any hymn that starts off with repeated notes is oftentimes strong. It goes [plays]…he is exhorting his soul to praise the King of heaven. It has that strong beginning, and it jumps up the fourth, a good interval there for strength, and it’s like A Mighty Fortress is Our God [plays]. Any hymn that starts off like that is going to be a strong hymn, I think.

And the tune does soar, especially as it builds in the second line of it, where it’s saying, “Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven…” [plays]…the emotions just soar with it to “who, like me, His praise should sing?” And then it has this sequence, which goes down [plays]… “Praise Him, praise, Him, praise Him, praise Him…” and many hymns that introduce those words praise Him or Alleluia or something, seem to go down the scale like that. I think of another hymn….still using that same kind of phrase when we’re doing Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones. [Plays]…that descending phrase like that does that.

Dr. Thomas: That’s the perfect, perfect tune for that hymn! But it’s also sung to REGENT SQUARE in Britain.

Dr. Duncan: Really? Praise My Soul is?

Dr. Thomas: Yes... umhmm.

Dr. Wymond: But they should have always done it to this tune! [Laughter] You know they haven’t always got the message!

Let me tell you a little bit about the composer of the tune, John Goss. He is said to be the last of the great English school of church composers because he dedicated himself exclusively to composition for the church, and his name was Sir John Goss. He was born in 1800, and lived right through the Victorian period to 1880. He was born in Hampshire, in England, and then as an eleven-year-old, he was seen to be talented, so he was sent to be a chorister at the Chapel Royal, that great training ground that we’ve talked about before. And then the biographers tell us that when his voice broke and he became an alto and then a tenor and so on like that, in 1816 he began studying composition.

Now, I think that’s kind of an interesting thing. His voice did not change until he was 16, which was so common back in those days…

Dr. Duncan: Today it’s much earlier, isn’t it? Partly just physiological differences between us and them.

Dr. Wymond: Much earlier. I think it’s diet and things like that now, which means that back in those days the choristers could get very good. They would be high school students, still singing soprano. And also it means that hymns were pitched higher back in those days, and so this hymn was probably in the key of E, which is kind of high for us today. And also it means that today in the choir schools they have to have a lot of extra sopranos in training, because the boys don’t remain sopranos very long.

When his voice broke, he started studying composition with Atwood, who was the organist at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, and then Goss himself became an organist when he was 24, at St. Luke’s in Chelsea, where Lyte had been a curate. So their paths crossed at that time. And then when Atwood…who was an important early nineteenth century composer…died, Goss succeeded him at St. Paul’s Cathedral and became the organist there until 1872. And he wrote a number of anthems during that period of time, some of which we still sing. I think my favorite is O Savior of the World. It’s a simple anthem, and yet it is very sincere and a wonderful complement to the text that he’s writing. So at the same time he was at St. Paul’s Cathedral, he also was a Professor of Harmony at the Royal Academy of Music, and he was there for 47 years. That was often common for whoever was at St. Paul’s or at Westminster Abbey, to be an instructor there. And so I think it’s a really fine tune. He left us a couple of Christmas songs that we like. One of them is See Amid the Winter’s Snow…I love that tune! And also he took the Polish carol, Infant Holy, Infant Lowly, and set that. That has become part of our repertoire.

Dr. Duncan: The text to this Psalm – it’s a Psalm rendering, really. It’s based on Psalm 103. I think many in our listening audience will remember the very opening words of that Psalm: “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless His holy name.” The English sort of paraphrase approach that Lyte uses here changes that bless to “praise, my soul, the King of heaven.” But like so many of the Psalms – and very frankly, like so many of the hymns that we’ve studied – this is in the first instance a self-exhortation. It’s an exhortation to oneself to bless the Lord (or to praise the Lord) and it begins to pile up reasons to yourself why you ought to praise the Lord.

And one of the things, Derek, I like about this Psalm and this song – this hymn that Henry Lyte has composed based on Psalm 103 – is the way that it does not ignore the darker side of Christian experience: the wrestling with trials and troubles and sorrows, and pain and heartache. And you see it repeatedly in the text from the second to the fourth stanza.

Even though it begins very upbeat – “Praise, my soul, the King of heaven, to His feet your tribute bring; Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven…” and I love that phrase! That’s very powerful, just like, Bill, the opening… “Praise my soul the King…that has ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven….” There’s just so much momentum in that line. “Who, like me, His praise should sing?” It’s very upbeat.

But then, “Praise Him for His grace and favor to our fathers in distress…” we have in the second stanza. The third stanza: “Father-like, He tends and spares us, well our feeble frame He knows; In His hands He gently bears us, rescues us from all our foes.” And so with the opposition of the world.

Then the fourth stanza: “Frail as summer’s flower we flourish, blows the wind and it is gone; but while mortals rise and perish, God endures unchanging on.” And so there in three consecutive stanzas we have distress, opposition, and death.

I think one of the things that we miss so much, Derek, from modern songs that are written, is that in their lyrics there is a perpetual upbeat-ness and optimism about them that ignores the hard side of the Christian life, and I think one of the things that I love about the best hymnody of the church (and of course it’s just reflecting the Psalms themselves) is the realism of them. The mention of those things doesn’t turn this hymn into a dirge, by any stretch; but it’s so realistic and so helpful, I think, for Christians to praise God without having to pretend there are not hard things in our experience. Thoughts on that, or maybe you want to go a different direction in looking at the text?

Dr. Thomas: Well, of course we constantly have to remind ourselves that we are one of the first of maybe two or three generations now where life expectancy is much longer than it would have been in the early nineteenth century, let alone the eighteenth or seventeenth century. And so as a minister, he would have been surrounded by death and disease and the burial of…

Dr. Duncan: Infant mortality rates would have been very high.

Dr. Thomas: Yes. So you couldn’t have them singing the kinds of things that would appeal to our generation, because of the sheer prevalence of death. I love those words ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven. There are four sermons on those words alone. I also read here that Psalm 103 of course was part of the liturgy of The Book of Common Prayer, so these words, the words of Psalm 103, would have been very familiar to any congregation, and his versification of them therefore would provide yet further additional help.

I love the fifth stanza: “Angels, help us to adore Him….” And I’ve been accused of harping on this theme that when we worship and pray, that we mingle our voices with angels.

Dr. Duncan: I love it when you pray that prayer. You remind us that when we gather on the Lord’s Day as a congregation that we not only have the inestimable privilege based upon the promise of Christ that where two or three are gathered in His name, there He is in our midst; but there is, as we thought about in the song The Church’s One Foundation, this mystical sense in which we share a union in our worship with the exalted saints above. And not only with the saints, but with the elders, and with, as you say, the angels and the archangels. Now, where are we getting that from? That’s not an idea that’s coming from some sort of medieval tradition, Derek. That’s coming out of your biblical convictions. Where are those convictions coming from in the Bible?

Dr. Thomas: Well, of course, the doctrine of the church, in places like Ephesians and the book of Revelation. Indeed, one could argue that one of the main lessons of the book of Revelation (rather than trying to pinpoint the return of Jesus) is actually the communion of saints here on earth with those in heaven.

Dr. Duncan: Yes, it’s almost John’s way of showing to us what the prophet showed to his servant in the Old Testament when he said, “There are more that are with us than are with them.” So when we feel like a small, persecuted minority tucked off somewhere, it’s like John wants to pull the curtain back and say, ‘Look at the myriads and myriads, and look at the angels and the archangels. You’re with them. They’re with you.”

Dr. Thomas: You know, and we suffer terribly in our day and age from the individualism that has been part of evangelicalism. And one does need to stress the individual, that we individually need to be born again and have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, but there’s also of course the communion of saints. There’s the corporate idea of the church, and some of these hymns, I think, if we sing them with understanding (as Paul says in I Corinthians 14 that we sing with understanding), I think help us to reflect on God’s great provision for us. Because in the loneliness of the twenty-first century, especially those who live even in big cities can be terribly lonely and despair – and suicidal, even. One of the pastoral effects of the doctrine of the church is to reinforce that we are surrounded by brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ.

Dr. Duncan: The text of the Psalm itself is one that we often read at funerals. Psalm 103 is one of the favorite songs because it does speak of the Lord’s graciousness and patience, and His slowness to anger and the plenteousness of His love.

Dr. Thomas: And the fleetingness of life: “The days of man are but as grass, for he flourisheth as a flower of the field; for as soon as the wind goeth over it, it is gone.”

Dr. Duncan: And Henry Lyte was not afraid to remind us of that in the hymn. That’s something that I think many hymn writers today would want to anesthetize us to. They want to pull that out; they wouldn’t want us to think about that. But Henry Lyte wants us, in the very context of praising God to remember that we are here but for a day, and we are gone. And, boy! Is that an important thing to learn!

I think we were just thinking on this not long ago when we were looking at Psalm 90, Moses’ great Psalm in which one of the big prayers of petition that Moses prays at the end of that Psalm is, “Teach us to number our days.” It’s something that we have to constantly be reminded of.

Dr. Thomas: Yes. It’s a wonderful way to end the hymn: “Sun and moon, bow down before Him, dwellers all in time and space.” Of course it’s the Psalm that’s saying that, but just the language “dwellers all in time and space”…the whole of creation….

Dr. Duncan: There’s a world of theology in that line. There’s the Creator/creature distinction. You even hear the echoes of Genesis 1 there.

Dr. Thomas: Well, we were speaking recently of a book that everyone seems to be talking about where the doctrine suddenly - as though it were some new doctrine! - emerges. But of course it’s the Bible. It’s here in the Psalm – the importance of the fact that we are part of the rest of creation, and the Creator/creature distinction.

Dr. Duncan: And even the sun and the moon, which in so many ancient cultures when this Psalm was first written would have been worshiped as deities, must bow down before the sovereign God who actually created them and brought everything else in the world into being.

Dr. Thomas: Well, even in our own time, you can’t enter Facebook or Google without saying “what is your zodiac sign?” as though the movement of the planets affected who or what you were, or ….

Dr. Duncan: And plenty of the people in the media and the print media and the internet and such still have their own little private astrological worship of the astronomical bodies. So here again is a beautiful Christian declaration of the sovereignty of God and an enjoyment of praise to all who trust in Him.

Dr. Thomas: And we’re going to hear it sung to LAUDE ANIMA, and not REAGENT SQUARE, Bill! The perfect tune! [Laughter]

Dr. Wymond: This will be the St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir and Organ, with John Scott conducting.

“Praise, my soul, the King of heaven, to His feet your tribute bring;

Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven, who, like me, His praise should sing?