The following Friday forenoon, while preparing for the Bible-class, there flashed into my mind a tune I had heard in Edinburgh eight years before. It sounded as if it might be a suitable vàdy for the hymn; for I had tried some of the old Scotch psalm-tunes in vain. There was no marriage likeness between them and the hymn, and till the echo of this tune from the solitary cornopean player on an Edinburgh street came up, match-making did not seem my forte. I do not remember that tune ever entering my head again from that day, when first heard in 1868, till it flashed into my mind that forenoon in 1876. John Wesley is credited with saying, that it was not fair to let the devil have all the best of the tunes. I tried the hymn and the tune over, and it was quite evident that that tune had been intended as the vàdy for that hymn, although, perhaps, the composer did not know what he was doing when he produced it. The ‘marriage likeness’ was so clear, that I proclaimed the banns and united them there and then. I sung the hymn, set to the new tune, to the class in the afternoon. ‘That’s it, sir,’ they said. ‘We knew you could find a vàdy for that hymn, if you only set your wits to work.’
At the opening services, the hymn was sung so well and heartily that the author said to me, on our way home to the manse after the service: ‘How well and heartily your people sing that hymn of mine!’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they sing it very well, don’t they?’ He said: ‘I never heard it sung better, but what tune is that you sing it to, and who set it to that tune?’ I answered ‘I had.’ ‘What tune is it?’ he asked. I said, ‘Don’t you know it?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do, and yet I can’t name it.’ I said: ‘It’s “God bless the Prince of Wales.”’ Of course it is,’ he said; ‘but how did you come to set it to that tune? We sing it to “Missionary” in the capital.’ I said, ‘We have another vàdy for that tune here in Vònizòngo,’ and then I told him the whole story, and found that the idea was as new to him as it had been to me.
MARTYRS’ MEMORIAL CHURCH, FIHAONANA.
THE SPURGEON OF MADAGASCAR.
MARTYRS’ MEMORIAL CHURCH, AMPAMARINANA.
The Rev. W. E. Cousins told in 1877 the following rather amusing incident with regard to the advent of that hymn in Antanànarìvo. He said: ‘Mutual confidence is a thing scarcely known yet in Madagascar, not known at all, perhaps, apart from the influence of the Gospel, and now and then these suspicious people see danger threatening their commonwealth in little suspected quarters. Quite recently a hymn was published. It is our Malagasy representative of “From Greenland’s icy mountains.” The first verse might be translated as follows:
Oh, speed Thee, gracious Sovereign,
Set up Thy rightful throne;
Oh, hasten, Lord, and take Thee,