Illuminations
Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken
by Anthony Esolen
One of the ironies of our faith must surely be that saints have fought not only for God but also, at times, against one another, and we hope that God in his mercy will forgive us our short-sightedness and ineptitude and, as the poet Herbert says, "make up our defects with His sweet art."
It is the deep middle of the night, in the Shenandoah Valley. The year is 1862, and a young Confederate private huddled in his blanket wakes to a strange sound. It is not an owl or a nighthawk, but the General himself, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, who has himself taken the watch over his men, and who is singing, or attempting to sing, because he had not the ear for it, though he always had the heart. He is singing one of his favorite hymns, "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken," not to our well-known melody Austria, but to Harwell, a melody just as joyful and just as inauspicious for someone who could not sing. General Jackson loved hymns, held regular religious and prayer services for his army, was a man of deep Christian humility, and believed fervently in the justice of his cause.
In that same campaign he came upon a Confederate chaplain and his servant, a black lad named John. When the chaplain, one James Power Smith, approached nearer, he heard Jackson exclaim with pleased surprise, "Why, is that you, John?" The boy had been one of Jackson's Sunday scholars back home, to whom he had given the Westminster Shorter Catechism. That Catechism, said Reverend Smith, might have gone a way toward explaining why the boy John, alone among his servants, could not resist riding out on his mare to behold the action, "and seemed most happy in the fire and smoke of battle."
I don't care to speculate on which side John was hoping to see victorious. I have not the slightest doubt of General Jackson's sincerity. It is entirely possible that he did not know who wrote the lyrics to the hymn he loved so well. That was John Newton, the slave-trader who found the Lord, or rather whom the Lord found, and whose life the Lord transformed, so that he became not only an evangelist but a bitter foe of all that he had done before, when he was by his own testimony "a wretch." Newton and William Cowper—the morose Christian poet who surely worked out his salvation in fear and trembling—collaborated on a collection, the Olney Hymns (1779), wherein we find "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken."
The City & the Rock
It is a joyful and triumphant hymn that transcends the heat and mire of the day. I don't believe it could be written now, just as we are not going to see a general in the Army win the devotion of his men by a constant and courageous Christian piety, like a dye that works into the heart of the human fabric. That is because Newton took his inspiration from the whole of Scripture, fusing in the heat of intellectual and moral passion images and motifs from the Red Sea to the heavenly Jerusalem. The first stanza springs from the verse from Psalm 87, "Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God":
Glorious things of thee are spoken,
Sion, city of our God;
He whose word cannot be broken
Formed thee for His own abode;
On the Rock of Ages founded,
What can shake thy sure repose?
With salvation's walls surrounded,
Thou mayst smile at all thy foes.
But the "Rock of Ages" comes from the familiar rendering of Isaiah 26:4 by fellow hymnodist Augustus Toplady: "Trust ye in the Lord for ever: for in the Lord Jehovah is everlasting strength." "We have a strong city," says the prophet; "salvation will God appoint for walls and bulwarks" (26:1).
The Water & the Bread
The "Rock" reminds Newton of the incident when Moses struck waters from the rock for the children of Israel as they thirsted in the desert, but as we see, there is much more:
See, the streams of living waters
Springing from eternal love,
Well supply thy sons and daughters,
And all fear of want remove.
Who can faint, when such a river
Ever flows, their thirst to assuage?
Grace which, like the Lord, the giver,
Never fails from age to age.
"The glory of the Lord is risen upon thee," cries Isaiah in his vision of Jerusalem redeemed. "Thy sons shall come from far, and thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side" (Is. 60:1,4). "Ho, every man that thirsteth," he cries, "come ye to the waters!" (Is. 55:1). They are the mystic waters of grace that Ezekiel saw bursting forth from the temple as from a fount (Ez. 47), that Jesus promises to everyone who follows him, for, as he says to the Samaritan woman, "the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life" (John 4:14). Newton is surely thinking also of the water flowing with blood from the right side of the crucified Lord, which St. John sees again in a vision of the consummation of all things: "And he showed me a pure river of the water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb" (Rev. 22:1).
Newton then returns to the tremendous manifestations of the power of God when he led Israel out of bondage in Egypt—an episode in Scripture that must have wrung his heart. I do not know what beliefs Newton held as regards the Eucharist, but he surely does understand the spiritual sustenance that God gives to the heart of the once-enslaved sinner:
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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