A bronze relief by Mario Raggi depicting one of the various charitable acts of Dr. Evan Pierce on the column in the Evan Pierce Memorial Garden in Denbigh, Wales.
Image © Copyright Eirian Evans and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Licence.
The hymn I picked today from Sing Praise was ‘There’s a wideness in God’s mercy’ by Frederick Faber. John points out that the hymn is a shortened version of another, older hymn ‘Souls of men, why will ye scatter?’ (or in a modern inclusive version, ‘Righteous souls, why will you scatter?’) with an extra 8-line verse (or two 4-line ones) at the start, setting the scene for the rest of the hymn in humanity’s tendency to wander from God. That’s what he used in morning prayer, to a different tune. But it’s the Sing Praise book that I’m blogging this year, and coincidentally our own church music group sang ‘There’s a wideness in God’s mercy’ to the same tune Coverdale before last Sunday’s service. So that’s my starting point.
The words of the hymn tackle some misconceptions of the Christian understanding of God. Is the greatest virtue that of liberty (verse 1)? No, greater virtues are mercy and justice, seen in the Bible as two aspects of God’s character as well as the basis of good human law – not opposed, but as the two sides of the balance that make liberty workable. If the rule of law strays too far towards strict justice, people get punished for innocent mistakes, while too far towards mercy and the guilty go unpunished. God is not a vengeful deity but one who demands and administers justice with mercy: ‘there is no place where earth’s failings have such kindly judgement given’. The opposite is in verse 2: ‘We make his love too narrow by false limits of our own, and we magnify his strictness with a zeal he would not own’.
God is also not remote and unfeeling: ‘there is no place where earth’s sorrows are more felt as up in heaven’. And in verse 2, ‘the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind’. Which is why he became one of us, sharing our emotions as well as our temptations.
The third verse focuses on the sacrifice of Jesus. ‘There is plentiful redemption through the blood that has been shed, there is joy for all the members in the sorrows of the head’. The final half-verse (if an 8-line tune such as Coverdale is used) challenges us to be more simple in our love for Jesus, to take him at his word. Meaning perhaps sayings such as “Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
As Stephen says I sang this hymn as “Souls of men, why will ye scatter”, and I think quite strongly that it ought to begin that way. So perhaps I should set out the first double-stanza (as in Mission Praise 607) which begins the hymn:
1. Souls of men, why will ye scatter
like a crowd of frightened sheep?
Foolish hearts, why will ye wander
from a love so true and deep?
Was there ever kindest shepherd
half so gentle, half so sweet,
as the Saviour who would have us
come and gather at his feet.
(Let’s call this verse 1, and renumber the verses in Sing Praise as 2-5, 5 being the half-verse at the end.)
With this beginning the hymn says that there is no sin which is too bad to be forgiven, and the wideness of God’s mercy is such that it encompasses all those who will come and gather at Jesus’ feet. The kinds of class warfare which have often plagued the Christian church (such as that which made working-class people feel they weren’t welcome in Anglicanism, and so instead they gathered in Methodist settings) are completely out of court (as v3 says in its 2nd half), and indeed God’s love encompasses all sentient beings (v4 2nd half). All are justified by the shedding of Christ’s blood (v4 1st half) and are united into one body. All that is required of us is that we should accept Jesus at his word (v5). The hymn is addressed to those who feel their fright at being without a shepherd, and it is about the glories of God reaching out to all those who would come to Jesus. It reassures such people that they can come to Jesus on equal terms with all others, and it is in the best traditions of a true evangelistic hymn.
But the problem with not singing v1 is that the whole slant of the hymn changes, and it becomes a rejoicing in lack of boundaries. Instead the hymn is now addressed to those who consider themselves within the church (because lacking a context the singer naturally sings it as if s/he is the audience), and it becomes a message about not being definite about what you believe. In fact, its message is now very nearly to say that it doesn’t matter what you believe – you are still under the mercy of God. It denounces creeds, which are attempts to set out the bible’s teaching in systematic frameworks, as “false limits” on the boundaries of scripture; it says that attempts to preach the judgement of God alongside his mercy are misleadingly zealous, and it says that there is no place for Christians to call other Christians to repentance.
It would be interesting to quiz F W Faber about his own intentions in writing the poem? Faber was one of a number of Anglican clergy who converted (in 1845) to Roman Catholicism following J H Newman’s conversion (also in 1845). According to https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/resources/history-of-hymns-theres-a-wideness-in-gods-mercy the original was published in 1854, beginning with “There’s a wideness …” and having 8 verses – and it was later expanded to 13 verses beginning with “Souls of men …” (1867, published posthumously). I think this history shows that even Faber had some unease about the universalistic message of the hymn, and sought to rein it in somehow … but of course it is possible that he actually wrote the start first and then crossed it out. (My own experience of hymnwriting is that I generally add verses on to the ends of my hymns rather than onto the beginnings of them – but of course my own habits don’t prove anything about Faber!)
Like “Dear Lord and Father of mankind”, which is also an extract from a longer poem (in that case of 5 or 6 verses out of 17 original ones), the context of the whole gives a very different slant on the meaning of the extract. In my opinion the compilers of Sing Praise have done us a great disservice in not printing the context-setting first verse of the hymn, which is the heart of its gospel message.