Page:The Methodist Hymn-Book Illustrated.djvu/422

 4IO THE METHODIST HYMN-BOOK ILLUSTRATED

Hymn 806. The Son of God goes forth to war. REGINALD HEBER, D.D. (28).

St. Stephen, published in Hymns, 1827. In his manuscript col lection in the British Museum it reads, The Son of God is gone to

��In Mrs. Ewing s Story of a Short Life it is the favourite hymn in the barracks, where the soldiers call it the tug of war hymn. The officer s son, who had been crippled for life by an accident, begs just before his death that the soldiers will sing it again. They go under his window, and when in the midst of the verse, A noble army, men and boys, a hand is seen at the window pulling down the blind. The brave sufferer is gone. The story made the hymn widely popular among children as the * tug of war hymn.

Hymn 807. For all the saints who from their labours rest.

WILLIAM WALSHAM How, D.D. (177).

Published in Hymns for Saints Days, and other Hymns by a Layman (Earl Nelson), 1864, in eleven stanzas of three lines with the refrain, Alleluia. The original form of the first line is For all Thy saints, but the bishop altered it to For all the saints.

Hymn 808. How bright those glorious spirits shine ! ISAAC WATTS, D.D. (3).

Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 1709. The Martyrs glorified. Revt vii. 13, &c., beginning, * These glorious minds, how bright they shine !

Watts s hymn was recast in the draft of the Scottish Translations and Paraphrases, 1745, and considerably altered in 1781. William Cameron, parish minister of Kirknewton, Midlothian, who died in 1811, seems to have been largely responsible for the 1781 alterations. The doxology is from Hymns Ancient and Modern.

When Duncan Matthison, the Scotch evangelist, was working in the Crimea, he was returning one night, worn out, from Sebastopol to the old stable at Balaclava where he lodged. He was trudging through mud knee-deep, and the siege seemed no

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