Christopher Wordsworth (1807-85), nephew of the poet William Wordsworth, was vicar of the delightfully named Stanford in the Vale cum Goosey and later Bishop of Lincoln. He held it "the first duty of a hymn-writer to teach sound doctrine, and thus to save souls," and he drew his hymns straight from Scripture. This one opened his collection The Holy Year (1862) under the heading "Sunday." It takes its theme from Psalm 118:24, "This is the day that the LORD has made," and its second stanza counts three gifts of light, one from each Person of the Trinity: light at creation, Christ risen from the depths of the earth, and the Spirit sent from heaven, all on the first day of the week. The text we sing only partly resembles Wordsworth's. His original blurred the Jewish Sabbath with the Christian Sunday, and later editors reworked it; the Episcopal Hymnal 1982 changed his "On thee," which addressed the day itself, to "This day," so that praise goes to the Creator and not to His creation, and it replaced his last stanzas with two new ones. LSB follows that version. The LSB companion notes that since the "day of rest" is Sunday, Sunday is the only day on which the hymn is properly sung. The tune ELLACOMBE is a German melody first printed at Stuttgart in 1784.
Sung at Our Saviour
2026