This hymn is a brilliant English paraphrase of the ancient Latin hymn “Veni Creator Spiritus,” dating to the ninth or tenth century and historically considered second only to the Te Deum in popularity among Latin hymns. The paraphrase was penned by John Dryden (1631–1700), who perfected the neoclassical style of rhyming couplets. Dryden had a life full of political and religious shifts: he initially supported Cromwell, later backed the Restoration (becoming England’s poet laureate), and converted to Roman Catholicism in 1685. Even though he wrote this paraphrase after his Catholic conversion (publishing it in a 1693 collection called Examen Poeticum), John Wesley eagerly embraced the text and it quickly found its way into many Protestant hymnals. You might assume the word “humankind” in the first stanza is a modern editorial concession, yet it is original to Dryden’s seventeenth-century text. The Lutheran Service Book retains some of Dryden’s most powerful language often omitted elsewhere, such as “O Source of uncreated light” and “Thrice holy fount, thrice holy fire.”
Sung at Our Saviour
2026