Forgive our sins as we forgive 

Rosamond Eleanor Herklots (1905-1987), who wrote this hymn, was born to missionary parents in Masuri (Mussoorie), a Hill Station in Northern India.  She was sent home to England to attend Leeds Girls’ High School, and after that she went to the University of Leeds, reading French.  Herklots spent a brief period teaching in Palestine about 1930 but then returned to England to take up secretarial training.  She worked for the multinational corporation Unilever during the second world war.   After the war she spent many years as a specialist medical secretary before working in the head office of the Association for Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus.  She began writing hymns early in the 1940s and apparently wrote more than 70, although only a small handful have been published.

 

Herklots wrote two small collections of hymns for her parish church, St Mary’s, Bromley.  This one was printed in the parish magazine in 1966 and then included in the 1969 A&Msupplement, 100 Hymns for Today.  After an unauthorized inclusive version appeared in a hymnal the U.S. in 1978, she altered lines in the third and fourth verses: 'How small the debts men owe to us' became 'What trivial debts are owed to us,' while 'Then, reconciled to God and man' was altered to 'Then, bound to all in bonds of love.'"  [It was the Lutheran Book of Worship.]

 

Most non-liturgical churches use “Detroit,” a tune drawn from Sacred Harp repertoire, for this hymn.  The English Hymnal uses the tune “Epworth” by Charles Wesley, Junior (1757-1834).  Wesley, the older brother of the better-known Samuel Wesley, was, like him, a child prodigy.  In adulthood he was organist of the Lock Hospital and the Chelsea Hospital, and of Marylebone Parish Church in London, though, tainted by Methodism, he never held a significant Church of England position.  He was, however, admired by King George III, who appointed him “Royal Organist.”  He continued in that office during the Regency after 1810.  The tune is named for the Yorkshire village where Wesley’s father and his uncles and aunts grew up, where his grandfather had been the Rector.