Valentin Thilo the Younger, a professor of poetry and rhetoric in Königsberg, wrote Mit Ernst, o Menschenkinder near the end of the Thirty Years’ War and published it in 1642, appointing it originally for the Fourth Sunday in Advent, when the old lectionary’s Gospel was John the Baptist’s own testimony in John 1. Its opening stanzas paraphrase Isaiah’s voice crying in the wilderness as fulfilled in John’s ministry, and its Lutheran accent falls hard on grace alone: “To us by grace alone the truth and light were given.” Thilo’s own fourth stanza had bluntly warned that God’s fury falls on those who ignore John’s preaching; hymnal editors in 1657 judged the warning too severe for congregational singing and replaced it with a gentler close, and it is that softened form that reached English through Arthur T. Russell’s 1851 translation and, eventually, Lutheran Service Book’s “Arise, O Christian People.” Sung before Communion, its call to rise and prepare the way of the Lord meets the congregation at the very moment it comes forward to receive Him.
Sung at Our Saviour
2025