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The quoted passage from Erik Routley is problematic. Hymnal editors edit hymns; that's what they do. The edits here are sensible. The couplet beginning "But of all Thy rich graces this grace, Lord, impart" contains two lines of 12 syllables, and some of the other lines in the original poem, so praised by Routley are 10 syllables. Otherwise the poem has lines of 11s, perforce the tune is sung in 11s: in the often-used tune of St. Denio, each line is a steady march of 10 quarter notes ending with a half note. In other words, this couplet, which contains the main difference treasured by Routley, must be edited for metrical reasons; if not also because it is out of character of the rest of the poem: a turgid couplet emphasizing the vileness of Original Sin in the middle of song that otherwise spells out a clear message of praise and radiant light. The claim: "one of those general hymns of praise that the parson slams into the praise-list" is also bizarre. Presumably, generically busy parsons are randomly busy: any hymn in the hymnal is subject to hasty decision-making. Why single out this one? Routley does not offer any statistics to show that this hymn is "slammed" into a "praise-list" more frequently than any other. Perhaps Routley once attended a church where this hymn was over-used; otherwise, he has no basis for this sweeping generality. It would be nice to have a comment by some other hymnologist to balance Routley's mean-spiritedness, and his cluelessness about metrical hymnody. ~~ Vagabond nanoda (talk) 13:50, 5 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think Routley would have been amused if he thought his words would be rigorously parsed when he intended them as a kind of colloquial commentary. I agree that the meter of those original stanzas was poor and needed tweaking; but Routley was correct that the character of the hymn was dramatically changed with the removal of the final line, "Through Christ in His story, Thy Christ to the heart"--which implies that the story of Christ is myth when compared to the authentic Christ. John Foxe (talk) 22:15, 5 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
