Dear Lord and Father of mankind 

These words are part of a longer poem by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892), an American poet and abolitionist.  Whittier devoted much of his life and work to the abolitionist movement; he was the editor of several abolitionist newspapers, including the New England Weekly Review and one of the key journals of the American Anti-Slavery Society, the Pennsylvania Freeman.   He wrote two volumes of antislavery poetry.  Whittier was brought up in a Quaker household; as an adult in1836 he sold the family farm and moved to Amesbury, Massachusetts, where, as clerk of the building committee, he could oversee the building of a new Meeting House. In the latter years of his life, after the deaths of his mother and sisters, and after an amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery, he turned away from politically charged writing to produce his best-known poetry, including the famous Snow-Bound. A Winter Idyll.

 

The hymn comprises five of the six concluding stanzas of his longer, quaker-inspired, satirical poem entitled “The Brewing of Soma,” published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1872.  The poem, in 5-line stanzas, begins by describing the making and use of a psychedelic substance in ancient Vedic ritual activity.  After 6 stanzas it then dismisses later religious practices viewed as ritual substitutions for soma, spurning “music, incense, vigils drear,” “The Dervish dance, the Orphic strain,/The wild-haired Bacchant's yell,” “The naked Santon, hashish-drunk,/The cloister madness of the monk,/The fakir's torture-show!”  These activities are viewed negatively, for “We brew in many a Christian fane/The heathen Soma still!”  The last stanzas of the poem contrast such frantic activity with a quiet, meditative inactivity such as takes place in Quaker meetings.

 

Whittier’s concluding stanzas were extracted from their longer context, omitting the antepenultimate, by a British Congregationalist minister, Garrett Horder (1841-1922), for inclusion in his Congregational Hymns(1884).  Horder, who  wrote many books of a pastoral nature, is particularly known for his hymn collections, and for The Hymn Lover: an account of the rise and growth of English Hymnody (1889).  He also edited the complete poetical works of Whittier (first edition 1898).  No tune is specified by Horder in his words-only text; the norm would have been to sing some pre-existing tune in the right metre.

 

In 1887 a Bristol organist in Congregational and Methodist churches, Frederick Charles Maker (1844-1927), who had been a treble in Bristol Cathedral, composed the tune “Rest” for the hymn “There is an hour of peaceful rest,” by the U.S. Congregationalist minister William Tappan.  That tune was paired with Whittier’s words in 1887 in the LondonCongregational Church Hymnal, edited by George S. Barrett, and was then widely used in U.S. books, especially those of Evangelical churches.  Whittier’s hymn with Maker’s tune was in the 1938 Canadian Common Praise.  A second tune, Repton, came in 1924.  In that year Dr George Gilbert Stocks (1877-1960), Director of Music at Repton School, compiled a new school hymn book, Repton School: Hymns for use in Chapel.  Stocks, who had studied with Charles Hubert Hastings Parry at Oxford, obtained permission of the music publishers Novello to adapt the music of an aria from Parry’s 1884 oratorio Judith as a hymn tune.  The contralto aria, “Long since in Egypt’s plenteous land” became the unison hymn tune which Novello named Repton.  The new tune, with Whittier’s words, appeared in 1931 in Songs of Praise, of which Ralph Vaughan Williams was the music editor (with Percy Dearmer and Martin Shaw as text editors), and then in 1933 in The English Hymnal, with Vaughan Williams as music editor and Dearmer as a text editor.  

 

The first line is altered.