Jesus these eyes have never seen 

The text was written by Ray Palmer (1808-1887) in 1858 for The Sabbath Hymn Book: for the Service of Song in the House of the Lord.  Born in Rhode Island, the son of a judge, as a young man Palmer moved to Boston, where he worked in a dry goods store until, perhaps encouraged by a minister of the  Park Street Congregational Church, he spent  three years as a student at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. [where a classmate was Oliver Wendell Holmes] He then enrolled in an undergraduate program at Yale College.  Graduating from Yale in 1830, he taught in a private girls’ school in New York City and then at the (short-lived) Young Ladies Institute in New Haven, while he studied theology part-time.  In 1835 he was ordained to Congregational ministry and sent as minister to a church in the shipbuilding town of Bath, Maine, where he remained for 15 years.  He then went to the recently-established First Congregational Church of Albany, New York as its first permanent pastor.  In 1865 he became the secretary of the American Congregational Union in New York City (1865-78).  Palmer wrote much in both prose and verse. Of his many hymns in U.S. hymn books the best-known is “My faith looks up to thee.”  Palmer, apparently prompted by the Oxford Movement, translated several medieval Latin hymns.

 

We sing Palmer’s words to the tune “Nun danket all” as printed by Johannes Crüger (1598-1662) in Praxis Pietatis Melica, the most widely used Lutheran hymnal of the Reformation, where it set the words of the hymn Nun danket all und bringet ehr by Paul Gerhardt.   Crüger , an ethnic Sorb born in a small village in Eastern Germany, was first educated in a nearby Latin School and then studied music in Regensburg and later theology in Berlin and Wittenberg.  In 1622 he was appointed Cantor in the

Nicholaikirche in Berlin.  Cruger’s melody is adapted from a tune by Pierre Davantès(1526-1561) , a scholar of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew who had worked on the Geneva Psalter of 1560.  Davantès devised a “new and easy method for singing each verse of the psalms without recourse to the first, according to the chant customary in the Church.”  But, although new, the method was not easy for either the singers or the printers, for it required symbols both above and below the lines of notes and text.  It was never adopted.