Confessing Evangelical

As Percy Dearmer's corpus passes out of copyright protection (see previous post), here is a sad little tale of how copyright can entangle and hamper hymns (and other resources) that might otherwise have become treasures of the church.

Christopher Idle, in the Real Hymns booklet I referred to before, mentions in passing Canon W H Vanstone's 1976 hymn, Morning glory, starlit sky - "in its revised form which while available in many books may now be illegal to reprint".

Idle expands on this rather puzzling comment in a 1999 article for New Directions. William Vanstone published a book in 1977 called Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense, of which Idle writes:

If the book itself became a landmark for countless studies, seminars, and sermons, the final page was (from a hymn-lover's viewpoint) its crowning glory. Morning glory, in fact; so began the poem which perfectly crystallises the book's pastoral and incarnational theology. What a way to write a hymn! And how satisfying to sing, if we know it was not a commission dashed off in ten minutes, but came to fruition from reflection on long experience.

The poem was then adapted to turn it from a seven-stanza poem into a six-stanza hymn, with the editors (crucially) also changing some of the language, getting rid of Canon Vanstone's "thees" and "thous" and generally modernising the words. It appeared in this form in More Hymns for Today (the second supplement to Hymns Ancient and Modern Revised), and in that form is a beautifully written and challenging hymn.

The full words of the revised, hymn version can be found online here (the original poem is at the bottom of this page). For reasons that are about to become depressingly obvious I am not going to reproduce the full text here, but here are the final two stanzas of the hymn:

Therefore he who shows us God
helpless hangs upon the tree;
and the nails and crown of thorns
tell of what God’s love must be.

Here is God: no monarch he,
throned in easy state to reign;
here is God, whose arms of love
aching, spent, the world sustain.

In an era where it is the theologians of glory who often appear to have all the best tunes, how refreshing to see a hymn from a theologian of the cross. Except that it's highly unlikely you will see it anytime soon, partly because some hymnal editors have found it rather strong meat, but also for reasons explained by Idle:

In March this year, Canon Vanstone died, aged 75. Discerning editors want to include his hymn in future books, but his literary executors are allowing only the original, complete with thee/thou, and minus the other changes which helped to make it a small masterpiece. Result? Although the later text is in wide use, many new books will not carry the words at all. Modern editors may be happy with archaisms from 1777, but not from 1977. They will not choose the superseded text.

I think the "discerning editor" Idle probably has in mind is himself, as he was in the process of editing two hymn books at this time! But how sad that this hymn should find itself stifled in this way.

Labels: christopher idle, copyright, hymns, theologians of the cross