33. Reginald Heber (1783-1826): Pioneering Hymn Writer and Missionary Bishop
by Graham Kings
Date added: 22/07/2026
A bicentenary lecture given at the Hymn Society conference, Swanwick, on 23 July 2026
Introduction
Many thanks for the invitation to give this Bicentenary Lecture on Bishop Reginald Heber. It is a delight to be with you for my first Hymn Society conference.
It has been a joy to meet up again with Noel Tredinnick, Janet Wootten, Gordon Giles and Anne Harrison. Noel taught me the organ in 1977 at All Souls Langham Place, when I served as a caretaker there for a year after Oxford; Gordon I knew as a student at Ridley Hall, Cambridge in the 1990s; Janet and I met in Islington in the 2000s at Union Chapel and St Mary’s Church; and Anne and I came to know each other in Durham University 2015-18.
Rowan Williams, in his Foreword to The Revised English Hymnal (2023), states:
the distinctive role of the hymn, in its classical sense, is simply to underline the role in liturgical worship of hymnody that traces…the narrative arc of God’s movement among us: hymnody that follows through the story of the Christian year and of the journey of transformation that is being enacted within the liturgical process. (xx)
In this address I will outline Heber’s life, discuss the significance of his hymnody and consider three of his most famous hymns.
1. An Outline of Heber’s Life
Reginald Heber (1783-1826)was an innovative, pioneering hymn-writer, poet, academic, and missionary Bishop of Calcutta (1823-26).
He was born in Malpas, Cheshire, where his father served as Rector. He died tragically in Trichinopoly, Tamil Nadu, during his tour of South India, in 1826. He died of apoplexy, after entering a large cold bath set in the ground, in a climate of blazing heat. He was 42 and had only served 3 years in India.
At Oxford, where he studied at Brasenose College (1800-1803), he won essay and poetry prizes in Latin and English and became a Fellow of All Souls in 1805.
Martin Laird wrote the article on Heber in the new Dictionary of National Biography (2004). He mentions his tour, beginning in July 1805, with his friend, John Thornton, through Scandinavia and Russia as far as the approaches to the Caucasus, and on to the Crimea.
Laird states:
This tour was his introduction to the peoples of the East: he came to regard his experiences in south Russia as a foretaste of India. He returned home through central Europe and reached England in October 1806.
Martin Laird, Dictionary of National Biography (OUP, 2004, Vol 26 p. 212)
He was ordained in 1807 and for 16 years (1807-22) he was the Rector of Hodnet, in rural Shropshire, taking over from his father. There he wrote his 57 hymns for each Sunday of the Church’s Year, reflecting the Collect and the Gospel for each Sunday.
In 1808 he found his niche as a critic. One of the most powerful and influential literary and political journals of the 19th century, the Quarterly Review, engaged himto write regular book reviews and articles especially on books and current affairs in Sweden, Germany, Russia, Turkey and Persia, drawing on his year of travels. His review of Robert Southey’s Life of Wesley was 55 pages in length.
In 1809 he married Amelia Shipley, the daughter of the Dean of St Asaph, William Shipley. They had three daughters. After his death, Amelia edited his biography and poems.
Heber’s major prose works are his 1815 Bampton Lectures in Oxford, on the Holy Spirit, and his critical edition, in 15 volumes, of the Works of Jeremy Taylor (1822).
He preached sermons on behalf of both the Church Missionary Society and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.
In February 1823 he was awarded an Oxford DD (honoris causa) prior to his consecration as Bishop to serve as the second Bishop of Calcutta. This was a regular occurrence for bishops but in his case, the detailed research involved in his critical edition of the works of Jeremy Taylor showed his worthiness.
What did he give up in going to India – apart from his life? David L. Edwards has written:
At the age of forty in 1823 he abandoned one of the most charming parishes in England and certain prospects of literary and ecclesiastical distinction to become the second of the short-lived early Bishops of Calcutta.
David L. Edwards, Leaders of the Church of England, 1828-1944 (Oxford: OUP, 1971), p. 7.
What was his character like? Charlotte M. Yonge describes him perceptibly:
He was meantime rising in influence and station, - Canon of St. Asaph, Preacher at Lincoln’s Inn, Select Preacher before the University [of Oxford]. He was beloved by all ranks: by the poor for his boundless charity and sympathy; and by his equals, not only for those qualities, but for his sunny temper, bright wit, and playfulness, which showed in his conversations, his letters, and in many a droll, elegant, and scholarly jeu d’esprit, thrown off by a mind that could do nothing without gracefulness.
C. M. Yonge, Pioneers and Founders: or Recent Workers in the Mission Field (London: Macmillan & Co., 1874), p. 185.
I first heard of Heber when I was researching for my article, ‘Abdul Masih: Icon of Indian Indigeneity’, published in 1999. He ordained Abdul Masih (whose original name was Shaikh Salih) as the second Indian clergyman in 1825, the year before Heber died.
Masih was a former Muslim, who was converted under the ministry of Henry Martyn, the Cambridge scholar who gave up his Fellowship of St John’s College to translate the New Testament into Hindustani and Persian and died at the age of 31. Daniel Corrie, the Archdeacon of Madras, followed Masih up and presented him to Heber for ordination.
Heber wrote:
His rank, previously to his conversion, was rather elevated, since he was Master of the Jewels to the Court of Oude, an appointment of higher estimation in Eastern Palaces than in those of Europe, and the holder of which has always a high salary…
(Heber's journal for January 12, 1825, cited in Laird, p. 246)
Abdool Messeeh's present appointments, as Christian Missionary, are 60 rupees a month, and of this he gives away at least half! Who can dare to say that this man changed his faith from any interested motive? He is a most sincere Christian, quite free, so far as I can observe, from all conceit or enthusiasm.
He continued with a fine description, which also captures the character in this portrait:
His long eastern dress, his long grey beard, and his calm resigned countenance give him already the air of an Apostle.
(Heber's journal for January 12, 1825, cited in Laird, pp. 246-47).
The watercolour portrait of Masih in the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide, seems to me to be an ordination portrait, commissioned by Corrie.
Corrie’s wife described a moving embrace, as recounted by Angus Macnaghton in his biography of Corrie:
Mrs Corrie relates how, at Futtyghur, they met Abdool Messeh again and that “our dear girls were much surprised to see their Father embrace a black man! Yet they learnt to love Abdool very much afterwards, and the good old man evinced much tender affection for them.”
(Macnaghton, p. 88)
The death of Bishop Heber, which [Mrs Corrie] mentions briefly in her Journal, is covered more fully in her diary. “I have to notice,” she writes, “the news of the death of our late greatly beloved Diocesan Bishop Heber, whose funeral my Husband is at the time preaching, and here what a mercy I have to record! My dear Husband, who has been in a delicate state of health the last eighteen years, who has often been at the gates of death, has been raised up again, and again, has seen two Bishops pass away, one Archdeacon, two Judges of the Supreme Court, and several Brethren in the ministry.
(Macnaghton, p. 88.)
2. A Consideration of Heber’s Hymnody
Martin Laird, in his DNB article on Heber, states:
Hymn singing was still suspect at the beginning of the nineteenth century, particularly in high-church circles, but Heber compiled a collection of ninety-nine hymns, including fifty-seven written by himself: they were published posthumously in 1827 as Hymns Written and Adapted to the Weekly Church Service of the Year.
In 1771, John Newton had proposed to William Cowper that they should jointly write hymns for use in the Parish Church of Olney. These became famous as Olney hymns. Heber felt the need to compose hymns for his parish and people and worked with Henry Milman, who later became Dean of St Paul’s, and Robert Southey, the poet.
In 1811, hymns were published in The Christian Observer (an evangelical Anglican magazine). These were by Heber (at first to Scottish and Welsh folk tunes), Henry Milman and Robert Southey.
Heber’s biographer, George Smith, pointed out that Heber prefaced these tentative verses with this criticism of current songs:
The following hymns are part of an intended series, appropriate to the Sundays and principal holy days of the year, connected in some degree with their particular Collects and Gospels, and designed to be sung between the Nicene Creed and the sermon…
Of the merits of the present imperfect essays [ie trial hymns] the author is unaffectedly diffident; and as his labours are intended for the use of his own congregation, he will be thankful for any suggestions which may advance or correct them. In one respect, at least, he hopes the following poems will not be held reprehensible; no fulsome or indecorous language has been knowingly adopted; no erotic addresses to Him whom no unclean lips can approach; no allegory, ill understood and worse applied…
And now, at the right hand of His Father’s majesty, shall we address Him with ditties of embraces and passion, or in language which it would be disgraceful in an earthy sovereign to endure?
(Smith, p. 80)
J R Watson, in his magisterial book, ‘The English Hymn’, states:
His writing was a sustained attempt to restore dignity to hymn-singing…His hymns, therefore, are fervent, but their fervour is measured: the sprinkled blood, the cleft rock, the bleeding wounds disappear, to be replaced by a much more controlled enthusiasm and a more restrained hermeneutics, in which the Bible was a different kind of source-book…
(Watson p. 321)
Smith later mentions a letter to Heber’s close friend, Charlotte Dod, dated 23 November 1822 from Lincoln’s Inn. He recorded a meeting with the Bishop of London, William Howley, in Fulham Palace, London, the week before, about his compilation of hymns:
We read over the Hymns together, and he suggested many alterations, some of which I like, others I cannot agree with; yet his general principle is very good – that, namely, in all hymns and prayers we are to think of religion first and poetry afterwards; and that the cause of religion is best served by great simplicity of expression.
(Smith p. 101)
Smith also noted that:
While Heber was occupied in consulting his friends as to a lithographic edition of his poems, the call to Calcutta stopped this and other literary works.
(Smith p. 87)
In 1827, after his death, Hymns written and adapted to the Weekly Church Service of the Year, edited by Amelia Heber, was published by John Murray. Heber had written 57, Milman 12, and 29 were from other sources. One Advent hymn Heber adapted from Jeremy Taylor’s ‘Golden Grove’; one was by Sir Walter Scott.
Heber’s Poetical Works were published in three volumes in 1837 and also included poems by Milman.
Smith concludes:
In the history of English hymnody Reginald Heber holds a unique position, theological and literary. His collection, which began to be published in 1811, following all that was best in the Calvinistic schools of Watts, Cowper, and Newton, and in the Arminian school of Wesley, was the first that was Catholic, in the best sense of the word.
(Smith p. 91)
He noted that John Keble’s, The Christian Year, was published in 1827, a year after Heber’s death.
In the next part of my overview of Heber’s hymnody, we shall now look briefly at which of his hymns were included in Hymns Ancient and Modern second edition (1875), Ancient and Modern latest edition (2013), and The Revised English Hymnal (2023).
But first, I have a little excursive lamentation of a hymnwriter of distinction who wailed about having his hymns left out of Ancient and Modern (1904).
I am reading at the moment, The Benson Diary: Selections from the diary of Arthur Christopher Benson edited by Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam (Pallas Athene, 2025, 2 Vols). Benson, a son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward W. Benson, was Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge from 1915 to 1925, having been a Fellow since 1904.
He also wrote hymns, including ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. On 3 November 1904, he wrote in his diary:
One slap in the face I had. The New Ancient and Modern arrived for me. I sent in a dozen hymns, & actually corrected the proofs; but they have not used one. This is a real disappointment. I should have liked to put a new song in the mouth of the faithful. But instead they have eight new songs by Arthur Mason etc – such doggerel.
(Benson p. 369).
Gordon Giles and Anne Harrsion, both editors of the latest Ancient and Modern hymnal - and Gordon also for the New English Hymnal - are with us at this conference. I would like to hear from you both about some of the letters you have received, which contained similar howls of rejection…
Interestingly, A C Benson writes in his diary on 8 August 1898 that his father, whose biography he wrote, refused to accept the See of Calcutta in 1876.
So, to the hymnbooks. Which hymns of Heber’s were included in Hymns Ancient and Modern (1875), Ancient and Modern (2013), and The Revised English Hymnal (2023)?
Hymns Ancient and Modern (William Clowes and Sons, 1875, second edition)
Five hymns – the last three are not in modern hymnbooks.
26 God that madest earth and heaven (Evening)
160 Holy, Holy, Holy, (Trinity)
241 Hosanna to the Living Lord (Praise) – not in modern hymnbooks
439 The Son of God goes forth to war (Martyrs) – not in modern hymnbooks
358 From Greenland’s icy mountains (Missions) – not in modern hymnbooks
It omits: Brightest and best are the sons of the morning.
Ancient and Modern: Hymns and Songs for Refreshing Worship (Hymns Ancient & Modern, 2013)
Five hymns:
16 O God that madest earth and heaven (Evening)
96 Brightest and best are the sons of the morning (Epiphany)
276 Holy, Holy, Holy (Trinity)
317 Virgin born, we bow before thee (Blessed Virgin Mary, centred on Christ)
432 Bread of the world in mercy broken (Eucharist)
It omits: the three hymns from 1875: Hosanna to the Living Lord; The Son of God goes forth to war; and From Greenland’s icy mountains
The Revised English Hymnal(Canterbury Press, 2023)
Six hymns, the last one a new addition.
89 Brightest and best are the sons of the morning (Epiphany)
191 Holy, Holy, Holy (Trinity)
284 Virgin born, we bow before thee (Blessed Virgin Mary, centred on Christ)
346 God that madest earth and heaven (Evening)
374 Bread of the world in mercy broken (Eucharist)
395 O most merciful, O most bountiful (Prayer) additional to Ancient and Modern (2013)
3. Three Particular Hymns by Heber
We begin with his most famous:
Holy, Holy, Holy
Alfred Lord Tennyson pronounced Holy, Holy, Holy to be the finest in the English language and it was sung at his funeral (Smith p. 90).
Heber picks up the song of the Seraphim in Isaiah 6.3 which records Isaiah’s vision in the Temple in 742 BC, ‘the year that King Uzziah died’:
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory.
This, in turn, is echoed in Revelation 4.8:
Holy, holy, holy,
the Lord God Almighty,
who was, and is, and is to come.
It is worth noting that ‘Lord’ is the translation for the name of God revealed to Moses in Exodus ‘Yahweh’ and ‘God Almighty’ is the name of God revealed to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, ‘El Shaddai’.
Exodus 6.3 reads:
‘I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name ‘The Lord’, I did not make myself known to them.’
This is a deeply theological point. There is continuity in the concept of God between El Shaddai and Yahweh. The same God.
In turn, this song is said or sung every Sunday around the world, as the Sanctus:
Holy, holy, holy Lord,
God of power and might,
heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Note the sheer number of exclamation marks in the first verse:
Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!
Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee;
Holy, Holy, Holy! Merciful and Mighty!
God in Three Persons, blessed Trinity!
Holy, Holy, Holy! all the saints adore thee;
Casting down their golden crowns around by the glassy sea;
Cherubim and seraphim falling down before thee,
Which, wert, and art, and evermore shalt be!
Watson points out, about the phrase ‘glassy sea’, that it echoes Revelation 4.6: ‘And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal’ and that: ‘William Law, in The Spirit of Love (1752-4), had turned this into ‘a glassy sea’.’
Watson continues:
The hymn uses not only the imagery of Revelation but also the ideas of the Sublime found in eighteenth century and Romantic theory. Burke’s association of the Sublime with obscurity is exactly represented in Heber’s ‘Though the darkness hide Thee’; ‘there is none beside Thee’ is a representative of the Romantic Sublime.
(Watson p. 324-5)
I would add that these words also reflect on 1 Timothy 6.16: ‘It is he alone who has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see.’ Heber seems to turn the ‘unapproachable light’ ironically into ‘though the darkness hide thee’.
Perhaps there is also a hint of an echo of the phrase, ‘dazzling darkness’ of the 17th century Welsh poet Henry Vaughen in his poem, ‘The Night’?
There is in God (some say)
A deep, but dazzling darkness.
Perhaps also a hint of an echo of Martin Luther’s Deus absconditus - the hidden God?
Watson continues:
The ecstatic tone of the hymn, found in its rhythms, repetitions, and three-fold statements, is also associated with the Sublime… [this three-fold nature] also finds its expression in other forms – power, love, and purity; earth and sea and sky. Against the triples there is a contrasting pattern of twos and fours – the four line stanzas, the doubles – Cherubim and seraphim, merciful and mighty - which hold and accentuate the threes by contrast. The most dramatic of these is the opposition between earth and heaven, between sinful man and the purity of the Holy Trinity.
(Watson p 325)
Holy, Holy, Holy! though the darkness hide thee,
Though the eye of sinful man thy glory may not see,
Only thou art holy, there is none beside thee
Perfect in power, in love, and purity.
The last verse has a contrast with the first similar verse in its different second line. Instead of:
Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee;
It has:
All thy works shall praise thy name in earth and sky and sea.
In other words, it moves at the beginning from our worship to the culmination at the end of the worship of all creation.
Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!
All thy works shall praise thy name in earth and sky and sea.
Holy, Holy, Holy! Merciful and Mighty!
God in Three Persons, blessed Trinity!
The second hymn is his most controversial.
From Greenland’s Icy Mountains
According to John D. Julian’s Dictionary of Hymnology (John Murray, 1892), p. 399, as cited by George Smith three years later in his biography of Heber, Heber wrote this on the eve of Whit Sunday 1819 in Wrexham vicarage, where his father-in-law, the Dean of St Asaph, Dr William Shipley, was vicar and at his request, to be sung the next morning. On Whit Sunday evening Heber was to give a lecture to raise money for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.
Retiring to the corner of a room, Heber at once wrote down the first three verses…When the Dean called out, ‘What have you written?’ Heber read over the lines, when the Dean exclaimed, ‘There, there, that will do very well.’ ‘No’, replied the poet, ‘the sense is not complete’ and added a fourth verse.
(Smith p 82)
The first verse ranges widely geographically and imagines a call coming to deliver salvation:
From Greenland’s icy mountains,
From India’s coral strand,
Where Afric’s sunny fountains
Roll down their golden sand;
From many an ancient river,
From many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver
Their land from error’s chain.
J R Watson, in The English Hymn, thinks the:
tendency to preach, to extract a message from the situation, spoils Heber’s hymnody…Not only did he make hymns respectable for the Church of England: he made them overly didactic. It is this which destroys the beauty of his celebrated missionary hymn…
The magic of place-names is evident again: the glimpses of different countries are simple, rendered by adjective and noun, line by line, separate and vivid like the pictures in a child’s map of the world. But the last two lines, while showing all too clearly why Heber felt that he had to accept the See of Calcutta, twist the verse away from description to exhortation. The second verse, similarly, begins with description but mixes it with reflection.
(Watson p. 322)
I agree that it is the second verse which has especially caused offence for years and is remembered for its description ‘only man is vile’, in contrast to the beauty of nature, and of the heathen ‘bows down to wood and stone’. No wonder the whole hymn is now left out of hymnbooks.
What though the spicy breezes
Blow soft on Ceylon’s isle;
Though every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile;
In vain with lavish kindness
The gifts of God are strown;
The heathen, in his blindness,
Bows down to wood and stone.
Watson again:
The split between the beauty of description and the patronizing contemplation of the heathen is an extreme example of Heber’s method. The division occurs everywhere in his work, the description and the moralizing, is an example of the process which Coleridge described as ‘Fancy’, the aggregative faculty which adds elements together rather than fusing them. (Watson 323, referring to Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, chap 13.)
Can we, whose souls are lighted
With wisdom from on high;
Can we to men benighted
The lamp of life deny?
Salvation! O salvation!
The joyful sound proclaim,
Till each remotest nation
Has learned Messiah’s name.
Waft, waft, ye winds, His story;
And you, ye waters, roll,
Till, like a sea of glory,
It spreads from pole to pole;
Till o’er our ransomed nature,
The Lamb for sinners slain,
Redeemer, King, Creator,
In bliss returns to reign.
Finally, my favourite of his hymns.
Brightest and Best are the Sons of the Morning
Smith records that Heber’s manuscript hymn-book with music, in 1895, was in the possession of ‘the present Rector of Hodnet’. I’ve discovered that this was the Revd Richard Hugh Cholmondeley. The Rector supplied Smith with the information that ‘Brightest and Best’ was sung to the original air of ‘Wandering Willie’ ie ‘Here awa, there awa, wandering Willie’. He also noted that ‘O God that madest earth and heaven’ was sung to the original air of ‘Gramachree’. (Smith p. 92)
I love the idea of the Magi addressing the Star of the East and the alliteration of the opening ‘Bs’ in the first line and ‘Ds’ in the second:
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,
Dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid!
Star of the east, the horizon adorning,
Guide where our infant Redeemer is laid.
Some people have had worries about the phrase, ‘sons of the morning’ for two different reasons. First, in the 19th century, some misunderstand the phrase to be pagan concerning the divinity of the stars and left the hymn out of hymn books.
However, Heber is drawing on Job 38.7 – part of the most beautiful poem in the whole Hebrew Bible. Here is the Revised English Version:
Where were you…
While the morning stars sang in chorus
And the sons of God all shouted for joy?
Job is, ironically, a gentile and is drawing on gentile myths. Those who worried and wanted to use the hymn coped by changing ‘sons’ to ‘stars of the morning’.
Second, in the movement for gender inclusion in hymnody, it is also changed to ‘stars of the morning’.
The second verse has alliteration in the ‘Cs’ of the first line and ‘M’s of the fourth line:
Cold on His cradle the dewdrops are shining;
Low lies His head with the beasts of the stall;
Angels adore Him in slumber reclining,
Maker and Monarch and Savior of all!
Watson likes these first two verses – ‘These two verses allow the final line in each case to carry the doctrine without fuss and with a pleasing clarity.’ (Watson p. 323) However, he then thinks Heber begins to preach in the third and fourth verses.
Say, shall we yield him, in costly devotion,
Fragrance of Edom, and off'rings divine?
Gems of the mountain, and pearls of the ocean,
Myrrh from the forest, or gold from the mine?
Vainly we offer each ample oblation;
Vainly with gifts would his favour secure:
Richer by far is the heart's adoration;
Dearer to God are the prayers of the poor.
Watson comments:
This is unexceptional, but also commonplace, and a dull conclusion to the radiant epiphanic vision of the first two verses. From this dreary homily, Heber has to rescue the hymn by going back to the first verse, and his poetic tact in so doing is considerable: he returns to the images of the guiding star and the breaking dawn, with all their suggestions of light coming out of darkness. The darkness which is dispelled is characteristic of Heber, for whom ‘dark’, ‘darkness’, ‘darker’, and ‘darksome’ were favourite words.
(Watson p. 323)
Brightest and best of the stars of the morning,
Dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid!
Star of the east, the horizon adorning,
Guide where our infant Redeemer is laid.
When I was Bishop of Sherborne in the Diocese of Salisbury, it was a great joy to get to know Timothy Dudley-Smith. It was wonderful to meet with his daughters Sarah in Cambridge recently and Caroline at this conference.
In his book, A Functional Art: Reflections of a Hymn Writer (OUP, 2017), Timothy had some beautiful insights into this hymn. He described the difference between assonance and alliteration:
Assonance is alliteration’s more retiring sister, content to achieve her effects without drawing attention to them as alliteration is prone to do…The sense of the rhythm and movement owes much to the feminine rhymes and alliterations: Brightest/best, dawn/darkness, cold/cradle, dew/drops, low/lies, angels/adore, Maker/Monarch – all from the first two verses. But assonance comes into its own in verse 3…This provides an alternation between the short and the long ‘o’ in each of the lines: short-long in line 1,
[‘costly’ and ‘devotion’]
long-short-short in line 2, [actually, I think Timothy meant ‘short-short-short’ – ‘even Homer nods’]
[‘of’ and ‘Edom’ and ‘offerings’]
short-short-long in line 3,
[‘of’ and ‘mountain’ and ‘ocean’
short-short-long-short in line 4.
[‘from’ and ‘forest’ and ‘gold’ and ‘from’]
Three of these ‘o’ sounds at the start of words add the more obvious alliteration to the almost unnoticed assonance.
(Dudley-Smith, p. 97)
Not all have liked this hymn. Watson reports, in his The English Hymn (p. 400), that John Ellerton objected to it:
What are we to say of Bishop Heber’s offering to the Church as an Epiphany hymn an imaginary address of the Magi to the Star of Bethlehem?...Babies are the objects of a good deal of domestic idolatry, but why should a venerable Church Society invite a whole congregation to sing to a baby in church?
(SPCK Hymn-Book, new edn., p. 277 – John Ellerton, Writings on Hymnody, p. 229.)
Watson comments:
In view of the fact that this baby was the Lord God Almighty, Ellerton’s objections would seem to be misplaced here.
(Watson, p. 400).
Conclusion
I conclude with two quotations: one from Martin Laird and one from Rowan Williams.
Laird delineates fine contrasts between Heber and Middleton, his predecessor as Bishop of Calcutta:
Where Middleton was vexed and irritable, Heber was cheerful and good-tempered; where Middleton was pompous and haughty, Heber was unassuming; where Middleton groaned for the well-ordered routine of an English diocese, Heber relished the thought of being the first Protestant bishop to penetrate the mountains of Kumaon and the deserts of Rajputana.
(Laird, p. 38)
Rowan Williams, in his Foreword to The Revised English Hymnal (2023), mentioned in my introduction, states:
The job of the good hymn…is to seek to reflect the demands that the revealed truth and beauty of God place upon us, not simply to mirror what we are already comfortable with. And it is because of this reflecting of the truth and beauty of what it is believed that hymnody does indeed unite believers; it gives them a world of shared imagination, hope, and wonderment to inhabit.
(xviii)
According to these criteria, Heber was a consummate hymn writer.
As we celebrate this bicentenary of Bishop Reginald Heber, let us give thanks to God for his wisdom, temperance, resilience and gifts of poetry and hymnody – the pioneer liturgical hymn writer of the Church of England.
Bibliography
Timothy Dudley-Smith, A Functional Art: Reflections of a Hymn Writer (Oxford: OUP, 2017).
Reginald Heber, The personality and office of the Christian Comforter asserted and explained, in a course of sermons on John xvi. 7., preached before the University of Oxford, in the year MDCCCXV, at the lecture founded by the late Rev. John Bampton ... (Oxford: OUP, 1816) Available online: The personality and office of the Christian Comforter by Reginald Heber | Open Library
Reginald Heber, Whole Works of the Right Rev Jeremy Taylor D.D. Lord Bishop of Down, Connor and Dromore, (London: C and J Rivington, 1828) 15 vols.
Reginald Heber, The Poetical Works of Reginald Heber, D.D., Lord Bishop of Calcutta (Frederick Warne and Co, 1874)
Graham Kings, ‘Abdul Masih: Icon of Indian Indigeneity’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 23.2 (1999), pp. 66-68, republished in Graham Kings, Nourishing Mission: Theological Settings (Leiden: Brill, 2022), pp. 75-84. Available online, https://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/articles/abdul-masih-icon-of-indian-indigeneity/
M. A. Laird (ed.), Bishop Heber in Northern India: Selections from Heber’s Journal (Cambridge: CUP, 1971).
Angus Macnaghten, Daniel Corrie: His Family and Friends (London: Johnson, 1969).
George Smith, Bishop Heber: Poet and Chief Missionary to the East, Second Lord Bishop of Calcutta, 1783-1826, (London: John Murray, 1895)
J. R. Watson, The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study (Clarendon Press, 1999).
C. M. Yonge, Pioneers and Founders: or Recent Workers in the Mission Field (London: Macmillan & Co., 1874), pp. 178-198.
