This hymn began as a schoolmaster’s practical fix. George Hugh Bourne (1840–1925), an Anglican clergyman who served into his eighties, became warden of St. Edmund’s School at Salisbury in his thirty-fourth year and decided his students simply did not have enough good hymns to sing after receiving Holy Communion, so he wrote them seven and printed this one privately in 1874. It reached the wider Church in 1889 through a supplement to Hymns Ancient and Modern and has never left. Bourne ties the incarnation directly to the Sacrament: the same eternal Word who was born of Mary now gives His body and blood through grain of the field and fruit of the vine. He compares the Supper to the manna that fed Israel through forty years of wilderness, heavenly food handed down from the altar for a lifelong journey, and he ends at the Lamb’s high feast with the Church’s shout that the crucified One is “risen, ascended, glorified!”
Sung at Our Saviour
2026