9 June 2026

I was looking through our Church Hymnary, Fourth Edition and stumbled into the last section, ‘The Church Celebrates Oneness with the Church in Heaven’. It includes favourites like, ‘Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken’, ‘For all the Saints’  and ‘The Church’s One Foundation’.

None of these hymns surprised me. However, of the twelve hymns in this section, three of them turned out to be taken from the Scottish Paraphrases 1781. They include, ‘Behold what Witnesses Unseen’ which is a paraphrase of Hebrews 12 which begins, ‘We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses …’

‘Hark how the Adoring Hosts Above’ which is often sung to that magnificent tune, Desert, and ‘How Bright these Glorious Spirits Shine’  which is set to a Double Common Metre tune, are both paraphrases of passages taken from the book of Revelation which is all about the end times.

It seemed surprising to me that a quarter of the hymns in this section were from an eighteenth century supplement to the metrical psalms. In those days, the Christian Year was not observed as it is now and there would have been no celebration of ‘All Saints’.

Nevertheless, kirk folk would have been put in touch with pictures of heaven and  the faithful who ‘in the blood of Christ have washed/ those robes which shine so bright’. They would have  gained inspiration from the saints and the lives which they had led:

Let us, with zeal like theirs inspired,

begin the Christian race,

and, freed from each encumbering weight,

their holy footsteps trace. (Paraphrase 59)