Where Thou hast chosen, Lord, to set Thy face.
And then, if our stiff tongues shall faithlessly
Be mute in praises of Thy Deity,
The very temple stones shall loud repeat
Hosanna! and Thy glorious footsteps greet!
Near the end of the seventeenth century the New Version of the Psalms appeared, under royal and episcopal sanction, and began at once to supplant the Old Version. The authors were both Irishmen. Nahum Tate (1652-1715) was a very minor poet, who became Laureate in 1690. Nicholas Brady (1659-1726) was, like Charles Wesley, a scholar of Westminster and student of Christ Church. He entered the Church in Ireland, but in later life held various livings in England, being at one time Vicar of Stratford-on-Avon. The New Version was published in 1696.
Many attempts had been made to depose the Old Version from its supreme position as the hymn-book of the English Church, and some by men of much greater gifts than Sternhold, Hopkins, or any of their fellows. But the innate conservatism of Englishmen, and especially of English Churchmen, gave the Old Version a long life. Moreover, no version was sufficiently superior to it to win wide approval until Tate and Brady produced the New Version and secured royal ‘permission’ for its use in churches. Without this ‘permission’ it would probably never have dislodged the Old Version, though it owes something to intrinsic merit. Compared with the great hymn-writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Tate and Brady are, as a rule, dull, pretentious, diffuse; but as compared with their predecessors and the vast majority of their successors, their version deserves more consideration than it usually receives. Even in our own day there are more of their psalms in our best hymn-books than there are of Keble’s. It is unfortunate that neither of the authors was a man for whom it is possible to feel any great regard, or in whom one can take an interest.
To say nothing of
While shepherds watched their flocks by night,
what Church would willingly give up