Before the throne of God above  

The text of this hymn was written by Charitie Lees Smith (1841-1923), the daughter of a Church of Ireland priest.  Smith began writing religious poems as a teenager and several were published by the time she was 20.  “Before the throne” appeared without attribution in the collection by William Reid, The Praise of Jesus (London, 1863), with the title “Within the Vail [sic] with Jesus.” A U.S. publication, Praises of Jesus (New York, 1865), which borrows heavily from Reid’s collection, prints Smith’s hymn  on the same page as the tune “Duke Street,” which fits the words metrically, though the tune sets another text there.  Smith published the hymn herself in a small volume, Within the Vail and Other Sacred Poems, in 1867.  Here it was accompanied by the epigraph HEB. vi. 19, 20 (Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil; Whither the forerunner is for us entered, even Jesus, made an high priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec.).  

 

Twice-widowed, Smith emigrated to the U.S. permanently in 1886.  She stopped writing, or at least stopped publishing, at about this time or a little earlier.  She settled in California, where she devoted her energy to work with prisoners, first inside the prisons and then by establishing a boarding house for former convicts.  Having married an ex-convict from whom she was divorced in 1915, she died as Charitie deCheney in Oakland in 1923.

 

This hymn had a resurgence of popularity in the late 20th century after a new tune was written for it in 1997 by Vikki Cook (b. 1960).  Cook, a professional musician of Christian songs and an adherent of the Sovereign Grace churches, attended a service in which Smith’s hymn was sung to a traditional tune, Parry’s “Jerusalem.”  “The song bombed,” she reported, attributing the failure to the traditional tune, “because the old melody was a little too strange sounding to our American ears.”  Cook records for Sovereign Grace Music, the official worship music resource wing of the Sovereign Grace churches.  She therefore composed a new tune with the hymn’s first line as its title.  Cook’s work is part of the so-called Returned (sometimes “Re-tuned) Hymn Movement, which is interested in maintaining the words of some pre-21st century hymns, but in creating new tunes in order to bridge a perceived gap between traditional and contemporary worship.  The Movement had its beginnings in the late 20th century in some Reformed University Fellowships in the U.S., but the practice of writing new tunes for old hymns—putting old wine in new bottles, so to speak—is an ancient practice in Christian history.