Our opening hymn began as a poem no one thought was a hundred years old, though everyone assumed it was. Charles Coffin, rector of the University of Paris, wrote Instantis adventum Dei in 1736 for the newly revised Paris Breviary, intending it to replace older medieval Advent hymns for the night office of Matins, sung in the small hours of the morning. A century later the English clergyman John Chandler, hunting through old Latin service books for genuinely ancient prayers to translate, took Coffin’s text for exactly what it appeared to be, an early relic of the primitive Church, and rendered it into English in 1837 without realizing it was barely a hundred years old. Its lines still carry a trace of that midnight setting: the plea not to despise “the peace He comes to bring” and the prayer that sin’s dark deeds be gone “before the dawning day” spoke as much of the coming sunrise over the chanting monks as of Christ’s own advent. The later refrain “O Zion’s daughter, rise” echoes Zechariah 9:9, tying this hymn straight back to Populus Zion’s own Introit and its call for the daughter of Zion to behold her salvation.
Sung at Our Saviour
2025