Lead us, heavenly father, lead us 

James Edmeston (1791-1867),  who wrote the words of this hymn, was an architect and surveyor, with an established practice in London.  (Sir George Gilbert Scott was one of his pupils, though Scott’s later work departed significantly from anything Edmeston might have taught him.)  He designed and constructed a number of public monuments and some schools.  Edmeston’s family were historically Congregationalists, and his maternal grandfather was a Congregationalist pastor, but he became an active member of the Church of England in his twenties.  He was a Warden of St Barnabas, Homerton, East London, an evangelical parish.  A prolific hymn writer, Edmeston published a dozen books of hymns, and several other books of verse.  He is said to have written a hymn a week for several years, with a total near 2000.  He also wrote religious prose fiction.  Edmeston was much concerned for the welfare of children and especially the provision for orphaned children in London; he was a friend of Andrew Reed, the founder of the London Orphan Asylum, and he frequently visited its sites in Bethnal Green (girls) and Shoreditch  (boys).  

 

This hymn was published in Sacred Lyrics, Second Series (1821), and entitled ‘Hymn, Written for the Children of the London Orphan Asylum.’  It became the official hymn of the Orphan Asylum School.  Although written as a children’s hymn, it later became popular as a wedding hymn, especially after being used at the wedding of Prince Albert George and Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in 1923.  The three stanzas are structured on addresses to the three members of the Trinity.

 

The tune “Mannheim” is based on a German chorale composed or collected by Friedrich Filitz (1804-1876) and published in his Viers­tim­mig­es Cho­ral­buch zu Kirchen- und Hausgebrauch [Four Part Chorale Book for Church and Home Use], 1847. A composer and musicologist, Filitz spent some time as a music critic in Berlin, but he later moved to Munich and, working as a private scholar, collected and published 16th and 17th century church music.  His collections are in the Bavarian State Library in Munich.  A few other hymn tunes based on tunes published by Filitz have appeared in English hymn books, but only Mannheim remains in frequent use.

This hymn appeared, without music, in The Baptist Hymn Book, Comprising a Large and Choice Collection of Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs in 1858.  The music may have been adapted from Filitz by Thomas Binney (1798-1874), a Congregationalist preacher, in an 1853 publication.  The tune Mannheim, so named, is in The Praise Book, ed. William Reid, London, 1866, setting “Lord, dismiss us with thy blessing.”  It was arranged there from Filitz’s chorale tune by Henry Edward Dibdin (1813-1866).   The first Church of England collection to include it was Church Hymns with Tunes (1874), a publication of the SPCK edited by Arthur Sullivan, who first paired it with Filitz’s tune.  In 1875 W.H. Monk included the words and tune in the second edition of A&M.   The harmonization is by Lowell Mason (1792-1872), the 19th-century U.S. music educator and hymnodist who repressed shape-note singing.