If we could worship in church tomorrow, Holy, holy, holy would be my first choice of hymn, given that it's Trinity Sunday. It was written by Bishop Reginald Heber, and published in 1827, the year after he died, in a book which he had compiled called Hymns, Written and Adapted to the Weekly Church Service of the Year. According to the Preface, Heber had intended to publish the book soon after he arrived in India (in 1823) to take up the post of Bishop of Calcutta, "but the arduous duties of his situation left little time, during the short life there allotted to him, for any employment not immediately connected with his diocese." The book included 57 of Heber's own hymns, and another 41 by other authors. One of the latter was Ride on, ride on in majesty, which I wrote about in my post for Palm Sunday. Heber wrote all his hymns during his ministry (1807 -1823) as rector of Hodnet, which is in Shropshire, near Market Drayton.
In my previous post, I mentioned Bishop Heber's connection with the area around Wrexham, where I live. He was born in 1783 in Malpas in Cheshire, where there is a school named after him, which a few young people from Wrexham attend. He has an entry in The Encyclopedia of Wrexham (W Alister Williams, Wrexham, Bridge Books, 2001, 2010), because his father-in-law was vicar of Wrexham, and one of his hymns (From Greenland's Icy Mountains) was written while he was visiting the town. According to Alister (p 154), he wrote the hymn to emphasize the message of the sermon he was to preach in the Parish Church here. He also served as Canon Cursal of St Asaph Cathedral from 1817 until 1823.
John Julian describes Holy, holy, holy as "a splendid metrical paraphrase of Revelation 4:8-11". It clearly also has echoes of Isaiah's vision of the Lord in Isaiah 6:2-3. Heber's hymns are written to teach Christian truth as well as to praise the Lord God almighty. Among the truths contained in Holy, holy, holy are the fact that God is three in one (not surprising, given that it was written for Trinity Sunday!); the vision of Christian believers in heaven praising God together with the angels; and the truth that God's glory is greater than anything we can imagine.
Holy, holy, holy is usually sung to the tune Nicaea, written for this hymn by John Bacchus Dykes for the first edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern, published in 1861. The tune is named after the Council of Nicaea (AD 325), at which the doctrine of the Trinity was defined. According to Chris Fenner, "the opening triad of Dykes' melody is sometimes seen as a musical homage to the Trinity". I've also sung it to the tune Tersanctus by Gordon Hartless, although according to hymnary.org, the most popular alternative to Nicaea is Trinity by S S Wesley.
You can hear Holy, holy, holy sung to Nicaea here.
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