Charles Wesley never wrote the line everyone sings. His 1739 original opened “Hark how all the Welkin rings, ‘Glory to the King of Kings,’” welkin being an old word for the vault of heaven; it was the revivalist George Whitefield who altered it in 1753 to “Hark! The herald angels sing, Glory to the newborn King,” a change Wesley resented, since he disliked editors touching his verse. When a later hymnal tried to restore his original wording in 1904, the attempt provoked such resistance that it hurt the book’s sales. The tune began life entirely apart from the hymn, composed in 1840 by Felix Mendelssohn for a secular cantata marking the four hundredth anniversary of Gutenberg’s printing press. Mendelssohn was explicit that the music should never carry sacred words, writing to his publisher that it needed “a national and merry subject” instead. He died in 1847 never knowing otherwise; nine years later the English organist William Cummings set Wesley’s words to it anyway, and the pairing endured. As the Closing hymn, it sends the congregation into the night still singing the very angelic proclamation just read from the Gospel.
Sung at Our Saviour
2025