James Hamilton, an English clergyman, wrote this hymn directly in English, so it needed no translator to reach Lutheran hymnals. It first appeared in 1880 in Godfrey Thring’s A Church of England Hymn Book, placed in that collection’s “Old and New Year” section under the heading “New Year’s Eve” and prefaced with Psalm 134:2–3, “Ye that by night stand in the house of the Lord.” More than a dozen hymnals adopted it before 1900. The Lutheran Hymnal carried it in 1941 as hymn 110, and Lutheran Service Book selected stanzas 1, 2, and 6 of Hamilton’s original six, renumbered as stanzas 1, 2, and 5, while hymnologist Gregory Wismar supplied an entirely new fourth stanza for the 2006 hymnal. Set to the sixteenth-century German chorale tune ALLEIN GOTT IN DER HÖH, the hymn contrasts the fleeting darkness of the passing year, “this trembling planet,” with the fixed light of God’s altar. As the Opening Hymn, it moves the congregation from that trembling darkness toward the confident song that will carry them across the threshold of the new year.
Sung at Our Saviour
2025