On election day evening, November 2024, I posted on Facebook the following hymn, with the statement, “I’m just going to sit this here tonight, and say that it will still be true in the morning.” It is true yesterday, today, and forever. The Lord Jehovah reigns!
Below is the hymn by Isaac Watts on the eternal and sovereign God, derived from Psalm 93. “The Lord reigneth…”
And royal state maintains,
His head with awful glories crowned;
Arrayed in robes of light,
Begirt with sovereign might,
And rays of majesty around.
The world securely stands;
And skies and stars obey thy word:
Thy throne was fixed on high
Before the starry sky;
Eternal is thy kingdom, Lord.
Like billows fierce and loud,
Against thine empire rage and roar;
In vain, with angry spite,
The surly nations fight,
And dash like waves against the shore.
And all their powers engage;
Let swelling tides assault the sky;
The terrors of thy frown
Shall beat their madness down:
Thy throne for ever stands on high.
Thy grace is ever new:
There fixed, thy church shall ne’er remove;
Thy saints with holy fear
Shall in thy courts appear,
And sing thine everlasting love.
In our book The Sacred Harp, 2012 Edition, we sing the words with the tune Chambers, arranged by B. F. White from an older tune by Samuel Holyoke. White, with E. J. King, was the compiler of The Sacred Harp, published in 1844. Holyoke (1762-1820) was an American singing school teacher, composer, and tunebook compiler. It has been commonly repeated that music historian George Hood wrote, “There was no man of his day that did more for the cause of music than Samuel Holyoke.”[i]
[i] I have not found the source of this statement. I expected it to be in Hood’s A History of Music in New England: with Biographical Sketches of Psalmists and Reformers (Boston, MA: Wilkins, Carter, & Co., 1846) but I have not found it there yet. On page 177, re Holyoke, it says “See biography,” but I have not found the biography.
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