Thine be the glory   

This hymn is a translation/paraphrase of the French hymn, “A Toi la gloire, O Ressucité” by the Swiss pastor Edmond Louis Budry (1854-1932).  Budry was born in the town of Vevey, in Suisse romande, and educated in the Free Church Faculty of Theology established in Lausanne by ministers of the Église Évangélique Libre du Canton de Vaud, a breakaway group from the National Reformed Church.  He was a minister in that Free Church from 1886 until 1924.  Budry translated a number of hymns from German, English and Latin into French.   This hymn was written in 1884 and first published in Chants Évangéliques (Lausanne, 1885), set to the hymn melody by Handel now called “Maccabeus” or “Judas Maccabeus.”  It was later published in a YMCA handbook in Lausanne (1904).  Budry might have been prompted to write the Easter hymn by an Advent hymn of the German protestant theologian Friedrich-Heinrich Ranke, “Tochter Zion, freue dich” (Daughter of Zion, rejoice), published in Evangelisches Gesangbuch für Elsass-Lothringen, which is set to Handel’s melody. 

 

Richard Birch Hoyle (1875-1939), who translated Budry’s hymn, was born into a Methodist family in Lancashire; in adulthood he became a Baptist and studied for Baptist ministry in Regent’s Park College, Londan affiliated college in Oxford), graduating in 1900.  He served as minister in several Baptist churches in England and Scotland and spent five years as editor of the YMCA journal, The Red Triangle.  He was a Visiting Professor of Systematic Theology at Western Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (a Presbyterian foundation; now Pittsburgh Theological Seminary) in 1934-36.  Hoyle, who had a remarkable range of languages, translated the French Easter Hymn, among several others, in 1923 for Cantate Domino (1924), an ecumenical hymn book published by the World Student Christian Federation.  Hoyle’s hymn follows the spirit and much of the wording of the original in the first two stanzas, but his third stanza departs from Budry’s text, replacing first-person singular pronouns with plural ones and changing the tone from personal fulfillment to corporate salvation.  Hoyle added the detail of the grave clothes in stanza 1, as well as the allusion to 1 Corinthians in “death hath lost its sting.”  Both “conquering“ in stanza 1 and “conquerors“ in stanza 3 of Hoyle’s text reflect Handel’s chorus.

 

Handel wrote the tune in 1747 as a chorus, “See, the conqu’ring hero comes,” for his 4th oratorio, Joshua, borrowing some of the material from the Austrian Gottlieb Muffat’s Componimenti musicali.   The chorus was so popular that Handel inserted it into productions after 1751 of his 3rd oratorio, Judas Maccabeus (1746; the work was at least partly intended to celebrate the victory at the Battle of Culloden).  Called  “Maccabeus” or “Judas Maccabeus,” the highly popular melody first appeared as a hymn tune in Harmonia Sacra (1760), compiled by the Methodist Thomas Butts.  There the tune is unnamed and it sets a different Easter hymn, Charles Wesley’s “Christ the Lord is risen today.”  It was in The Methodist Hymn Book with Budry's words in 1933 and only later in major Anglican hymn books.