Anne Steele wrote “See, gracious God, before thy throne” for the occasion of a public fast. According to John Julian, this hymn was published in her Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional, 1760. The hymn is Common Meter, in seven 4-line stanzas. It is given below as it appears in The Works of Mrs. Anne Steele, Complete in Two Volumes Volume I (Boston, MA: Munroe, Francis, and Parker, 1808).
On the Publick Fast. February 6, 1856.
Thy mourning people bend!
’Tis on thy sovereign grace alone,
Our humble hopes depend.
Thy dreadful pow’r display;
Yet mercy spares this guilty land,
And yet we live to pray.
Ungrateful as we are?
O be these awful warnings heard,
While mercy cries, Forbear.
O’er all this wretched isle!
What land so favour’d of the skies,
And yet what land so vile!
For error, guilt, and shame!
What impious numbers, bold in sin,
Disgrace the Christian name!
By thy resistless grace;
Then shall our hearts obey thy word,
And humbly seek thy face.
We shall not sink in fear;
Secure of never-failing aid,
If God, our God, is near.
- The line “Tremendous judgments from thy hand” has this note attached to it: “* Earthquake at Lisbon, &c.”
The hymn and the associated fast grew out of the events of the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. Will Fitzgerald has written an interesting hymn history titled Earthquake hymn 354t Lebanon.
For more on the earthquake, see Lisbon earthquake of 1755.
For more on Anne Steele, see The Excellency of the Holy Scriptures.
To hear the Sacred Harp song Lebanon, see 354t Lebanon - Second Ireland Sacred Harp Convention, 2012. The Sacred Harp 1991 Edition uses stanzas 1, 5, and 6.
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