William Walsham How, later a Church of England bishop, earned the nickname the “poor man’s bishop” for choosing to serve the poverty of East London over the prestigious posts offered him at Manchester and Durham, and colleagues also called him the “omnibus bishop” for riding public buses rather than a bishop’s private carriage. He published this hymn in 1854 in Psalms and Hymns, a collection he edited with Thomas Baker Morrell in hopes the Church of England might one day adopt an official hymnal of its own. Composed in English, it needed no translation, and Lutheran Service Book retains all six of How’s original stanzas, with a new fourth stanza on the circumcision itself added by Gregory Wismar, the same hymnologist who supplied the added stanza in the Opening Hymn. Its tune, GOTT SEI DANK, first appeared in a 1750 Stuttgart hymnal edited by Johann Georg Christian Stötzel, who may have had a hand in the melody himself, though it remains formally anonymous. Moving in sequence from the wonder of the Name, through Gabriel’s announcement, to the circumcision and the Name’s saving power, it stands as the Hymn of the Day on the very feast that gives Jesus His name.
Sung at Our Saviour
2025