Isaac Watts died on this date in 1748 but is a presence in the life of everyone who next month will sing Joy to the World. He is the author also of At The Cross and Let Children Hear The Mighty Deeds, of O God, Our Help in Ages Past, sung at the funeral of Winston Churchill, and of When I Survey the Wondrous Cross. Charles Wesley said of the last that he would rather have written it than all of his own hymns.



So great a talent casts a shadow, and a lesser figure also died on this date, in 1900. Robert Lowry was a Philadelphian and spent his life and ministry within a hundred miles of the city. He was a Baptist minister, a music editor and a composer and among his notable hymns are Low In The Grave He Lay, the mournful solemnity of death overwhelmed by Christ's triumph, and Shall We Gather At The River. In a happy circumstance, the men are joined in one work; Lowry wrote the musical setting for Watts's hymn Marching to Zion.



There's another of the hymns of Robert Lowry that I've always liked and that, because of an association, has become more important to me and more fixed in my mind. My father, another Philadelphian, died suddenly on a summer Saturday a couple of years ago and this happened to be the recessional hymn at the Mass I attended the following day. And fitting. For songs of reassurance are meant sometimes to be sung through tears.



How Can I Keep From Singing



My life flows on in endless song;

Above earth’s lamentation

I hear the sweet though far off hymn

That hails a new creation:

Through all the tumult and the strife

I hear the music ringing;

It finds an echo in my soul—

How can I keep from singing?



What though my joys and comforts die?

The Lord my Savior liveth;

What though the darkness gather round!

Songs in the night He giveth:

No storm can shake my inmost calm

While to that refuge clinging;

Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth,

How can I keep from singing?



I lift mine eyes; the cloud grows thin;

I see the blue above it;

And day by day this pathway smoothes

Since first I learned to love it:

The peace of Christ makes fresh my heart,

A fountain ever springing:

All things are mine since I am His—

How can I keep from singing?

Campbell's Soup and the National Football League are sponsoring the Tackling Hunger Tour. Click and vote.

Along with remembrance of the anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy forty years ago last Saturday, a goodly number of the folk whose blogs are listed to the right noted the death on the same day in 1963 of the great Christian writer and apologist C.S. Lewis. So deep is the debt owed to him across our denominational markers, and in light of our common confession of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, that he might be considered one of the patrons of blogs4God. And it's another source of fellowship that he is given honored and grateful remembrance by so many of that body.



On November 22 also died, but in 1900 and just before the second birthday of C.S. Lewis, Sir Arthur Sullivan, celebrated and successful as a composer of light opera and alive still in their performances. He had been created Knight by Queen Victoria in 1883, according to the citation, in recognition of your distinguished talents as a composer and of the services which you have rendered to the promotion of the art of music generally in this country.



Sullivan's many and distinguished musical services included the composition of several fine and well-known hymn tunes. And among them is the noble and stirring anthem of encouragement in the spiritual warfare that Lewis so often described and illustrated.



Onward Christian Soldiers



Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,

With the cross of Jesus going on before.

Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe;

Forward into battle see His banners go!



Refrain



Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,

With the cross of Jesus going on before.



At the sign of triumph Satan’s host doth flee;

On then, Christian soldiers, on to victory!

Hell’s foundations quiver at the shout of praise;

Brothers lift your voices, loud your anthems raise.



Like a mighty army moves the church of God;

Brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod.

We are not divided, all one body we,

One in hope and doctrine, one in charity.



What the saints established that I hold for true.

What the saints believèd, that I believe too.

Long as earth endureth, men the faith will hold,

Kingdoms, nations, empires, in destruction rolled.



Crowns and thrones may perish, kingdoms rise and wane,

But the church of Jesus constant will remain.

Gates of hell can never gainst that church prevail;

We have Christ’s own promise, and that cannot fail.



Onward then, ye people, join our happy throng,

Blend with ours your voices in the triumph song.

Glory, laud and honor unto Christ the King,

This through countless ages men and angels sing.

It is quite true that Christ is a priest; but He is a priest not for Himself but for us, when in the name of the whole human race He offers our prayers and religious homage to the eternal Father; and He is also a victim for us since He substitutes Himself for sinful man. Now the exhortation of the Apostle, "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus," requires that all Christians should possess, as far as is humanly possible, the same dispositions as those which the divine Redeemer had when He offered Himself in sacrifice: that is to say, they should in a humble attitude of mind, pay adoration, honor, praise and thanksgiving to the supreme majesty of God. Moreover, it means that they must assume to some extent the character of a victim, that they deny themselves as the Gospel commands, that freely and of their own accord they do penance and that each detests and satisfies for his sins. It means, in a word, that we must all undergo with Christ a mystical death on the cross so that we can apply to ourselves the words of St. Paul, "With Christ I am nailed to the cross."



Pope Pius XII, in the encyclical Mediator Dei, issued on this date in 1947.

Some coincidences seem to carry a burden of meaning. It is, anyway, an appropriate reminder of our country's blessings and of the demands of liberty that today is the anniversary of the sighting of land by the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower in 1620.



The promise of freedom, the recognition of covenant.



It's also the anniversary of the great address of President Abraham Lincoln at the field of the Battle of Gettysburg.



The promise of freedom, under God.



Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.



Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.



But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

And men who have loved a crucified God need never think of torture as all-powerful.



Evelyn Waugh, in a letter to George Orwell.

Henry Martyn Dexter, author of The England and Holland of the Pilgrims and of a monograph on Roger Williams that defended the Massachusetts Plantation against the charge of intolerance, died in New Bedford on this date in 1890. Dexter was editor of The Congregationalist and also translated from the Greek what is thought to be the oldest Christian hymn whose author is known.



It was about the year 200, closer in time to the Passion, Death and Resurrection of the Lord Jesus than are we to the deaths of Adams and Jefferson, that Clement of Alexandria, whose memorial is kept immediately after that of my own patron in early December, recorded the lines of the hymn in his Peidagogos, for use in his school. Clement was the teacher of Origen, and there is no reason not to think that the great scholar sang this hymn when an ardent and studious boy.



At his death, Origen is described as being buried with honour as a confessor of the Faith. For a long time his sepulchre, behind the high-altar of the cathedral of Tyr, was visited by pilgrims. Today, as nothing remains of this cathedral except a mass of ruins, the exact location of his tomb is unknown.



A long way from the vibrant happiness and promise of youth, and a melancholy image, if that were all. But of course it is not, for we are redeemed. And all our tombs will one day be unknown, except to Him whose own, to His triumph and to our eternal life, is empty.



Shepherd Of Tender Youth



Shepherd of tender youth, guiding in love and truth

Through devious ways; Christ our triumphant King,

We come Thy Name to sing and here our children bring

To join Thy praise.



Thou art our holy Lord, O all subduing Word,

Healer of strife. Thou didst Thyself abase

That from sin’s deep disgrace Thou mightest save our race

And give us life.



Thou art the great High Priest; Thou hast prepared the feast

Of holy love; and in our mortal pain,

None calls on Thee in vain; Help Thou dost not disdain,

Help from above.



Ever be Thou our guide, our shepherd and our pride,

Our staff and song; Jesus, Thou Christ of God,

By Thine enduring Word lead us where Thou hast trod,

Make our faith strong.



So now, and till we die, sound we Thy praises high

And joyful sing; infants and the glad throng

Who to Thy church belong, unite to swell the song

To Christ, our King.

It was cold in Philadelphia after dark on Saturday, but it was also a night of crystal clarity and the lunar eclipse was vivid in its passage.



No clouds, and Venus now a morning star, so the words aren't descriptive. Maybe, despite that, evocative. The words of John Milton have been in and out of my head for days.



Now glowed the firmament

With living sapphires; Hesperus, that led

The starry host, rode brightest, till the Moon,

Rising in clouded majesty, at length

Apparent queen, unveiled her peerless light,

And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw.



Paradise Lost, Book IV, line 604

Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others...The opinion of the judges has no more authority over the Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both. The authority of the Supreme Court must not, therefore, be permitted to control the Congress or the Executive.



President Andrew Jackson, in a message to the Congress of the United States, 10 July 1832.

Josh Claybourn posted an entry today on The Bible and Slavery that ends with the powerful admonition and reminder that it should be Christians that continue to lead the crusade against slavery and oppression everywhere.



Well said, and a fitting day to say it. It was on November 7, 1837 that Elijah Parish Lovejoy, whose arguments in the anti-slavery newspaper The Saint Louis Observer were deeply influenced by The Second Great Awakening, was killed by a pro-slavery mob while defending his press.



Lovejoy was valedictorian for his fellow scholars in 1826, the inaugural graduating class of Colby College, and the college each year offers a prize in honor of its distinguished graduate.



The award was given posthumously last year to Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal writer who, on his way to interview a Muslim leader in Pakistan in January 2002, was taken prisoner and murdered by thugs incensed alike by his commitment to freedom and by the fact that he was an American and a Jew.



The meeting in Faneuil Hall in Boston in December, 1837 on the subject of Elijah Lovejoy's murder by the Alton mob was the occasion of one of the great addresses in the history of American liberty, the extemporaneous remarks and exhortations that made the reputation of the great abolitionist Wendell Phillips.

I've never watched "The West Wing," and would be perfectly content if I never heard the word "Sheen" again without the word "Fulton" close by ...





From today's evidence of Eve Tushnet's gifts as wordsmith and turner of phrase.