This hymn passed through three hands before reaching its present form. John Cennick, an Anglican of Quaker upbringing who moved through Methodism, the Moravians, and Independency in the span of a single lifetime, published the earliest version in 1752. Charles Wesley took Cennick’s core idea, Christ’s return on the clouds of heaven, and rewrote it almost entirely for his 1758 collection Hymns of Intercession for All Mankind; Lutheran Service Book prints Wesley’s four stanzas essentially as he left them. Its tune, HELMSLEY, first appeared around 1763 in a collection tied to London’s Lock Hospital, a charity chapel serving former prostitutes, and was originally sung as a light, almost dance-like air; only in the twentieth century did Ralph Vaughan Williams slow its tempo and thicken its harmonies into the stately processional now familiar in Lutheran hymnals. The text gathers Acts 1:11’s promise that Christ will return as He left, Revelation 1:7’s vision of even His mockers acknowledging Him, and John 20:28’s risen Christ still bearing His wounds in glory: a fitting choice for the moment before Communion, when the same Christ who will come on the clouds first comes to His people in bread and wine.
Sung at Our Saviour
2025