Our opening hymn nearly got a hymnal banned. Athelstan Riley, a wealthy English layman, spent the 1880s traveling to Russia, Mount Athos, Kurdistan, and Persia, and published a book on the monasteries of Athos in 1887. That love of the Christian East shaped this text: the first stanza summons the nine orders of angels exactly as Pseudo-Dionysius arranged them in the sixth century, descending from the throne outward — seraphs, cherubim, and thrones; dominions, princedoms, powers; virtues, archangels, angels’ choirs. When the hymn appeared in The English Hymnal of 1906, several bishops judged the book dangerously Catholic in its treatment of the communion of saints, and the Bishop of Birmingham banned it in his diocese. Percy Dearmer wrote to Riley that August warning of a “hornet’s nest” and rallying allies to “be ready to resist an attack on the Communion of Saints if it is made.” The hymnal won. The soaring Alleluia is itself an accident of scholarship: the tune came from Cologne in 1625, but Vaughan Williams copied it from an 1895 German edition that held the second-to-last Alleluia for a whole measure. The early sources have no such pause.
Sung at Our Saviour
2025