“YE CHRISTIAN HERALDS, GO PROCLAIM.”
In some versions “Ye Christian heroes,” etc.
Professor David R. Breed attributes this stirring hymn to Mrs. Vokes (or Voke) an English or Welsh lady, who is supposed to have written it somewhere near 1780, and supports the claim by its date of publication in Missionary and Devotional Hymns at Portsea, Wales, in 1797. In this Dr. Breed follows (he says) “the accepted tradition.” On the other hand the Coronation Hymnal (1894) refers the authorship to a Baptist minister, the Rev. Bourne Hall Draper, of Southampton (Eng.), born 1775, and this choice has the approval of Dr. Charles Robinson. The question occurs whether, when the hymn was published in good faith as Mrs. Vokes', it was really the work of a then unknown youth of twenty-two.
The probability is that the hymn owns a mother instead of a father—and a grand hymn it is; one of the most stimulating in Missionary song-literature.
The stanza—
God shield you with a wall of fire!
With flaming zeal your breasts inspire;
Bid raging winds their fury cease,
And hush the tumult into peace,
—has been tampered with by editors, altering the last line to “Calm the troubled seas,” etc., (for the sake of the longer vowel;) but the substitution, “He'll shield you,” etc., in the first line, turns a prayer into a mere statement.
The hymn was—and should remain—a God-speed to men like William Carey, who had already begun to think and preach his immortal motto, “Attempt great things for God; expect great things of God.”