The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended

ST. CLEMENT

I. Text: Background

In 1870, Anglican minister John Ellerton (1826–1893) was vicar of Crewe (now known as Crewe Green), Cheshire, and chaplain to Lord Crewe. The Crewe family had been the main family supporting the township since the 12th century, holding some 10,000 acres. Only a few years before Ellerton became vicar (1860), Crewe had been part of the parish of Barthomley, but it was made a separate parish in 1857. Ellerton would have performed services at the newly constructed (1857–58) St. Michael & All Angels Church, and he would have served the estate of Lord Hungerford Crewe (1812–1894) and visited his mansion, Crewe Hall. Ellerton’s biographer wrote, “Over against the church, on the opposite side of the Green, stands the parsonage, at that time a low, rambling house of whitewashed brick, since replaced by a structure more in accordance with modern ideas.”[1]

A year before his arrival in Crewe, he had published Hymns for Schools and Bible Classes (1859), which included some of his own hymns, and before leaving his post as senior curate of the parish of Brighton, Ellerton married Charlotte Alicia Hart on 19 May 1860. By 1870, their home had blossomed with the birth of eight children, five boys and three girls.

While in Crewe, Ellerton was deeply concerned for raising the aptitude of his parishioners, becoming in 1864 Chairman of the Educational Committee for the Mechanics’ Institution of the London and North-Western Railway Company, through which he taught classes in English and Scripture and led the reorganization of the institution’s library.

II. Text: Publication

One of his most beloved hymns, “The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended,” written while at Crewe, was contributed to A Form for Missionary Meetings: Containing an Order of Proceeding, with Hymns, Scripture Readings, and Litany of Intercession (Frome: John Hodges, 1870 | Fig. 1). In this first printing, the hymn was given in 5 stanzas of 4 lines, headed with Psalm 19:2, “One day telleth another, and one night certifieth another.”

The opening line of Ellerton’s hymn was borrowed from an earlier hymn, which was first printed in A Collection of Hymns for Household Use (Oxford: W. Baxter, 1828), given anonymously in the first edition but credited in the second edition (1852) to William Winstanley Hull (1794–1873). This older hymn consisted of two stanzas of eight lines, simply titled “Evening.” A lovely hymn in its own right (albeit metrically inconsistent), it is frequently cited as having appeared in multiple editions of Church Poetry, or Christian Thoughts in Old and Modern Verse (Derby: Henry Mozley & Sons, 1843), and it had been printed in some other collections before Ellerton crafted his own version. The second stanza is one long sentence, with the subject and its operative verb not readily apparent until the fifth line—“that coming strength” “be . . . devoted”—displaying the skill of the writer, but also potentially making it difficult for an average worshiper to parse. Aside from the opening line, Ellerton’s text has little in common with its antecedent, other than being a hymn devoted to evening worship.

Following the printing of Ellerton’s hymn in 1870, his text was given in two collections in 1871. In Robert Brown-Borthwick’s Select Hymns for Church and Home (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, 1871), the text was repeated as in 1870; whereas in Church Hymns (London: SPCK, 1871 | Fig. 3), for which Ellerton, Brown-Borthwick, and William W. How were co-editors, the text was altered slightly at 4.4, exchanging “wondrous acts be” for “wondrous doings.” This printing carried a reference to 1 Chronicles 23:30 (“Their office was to stand every morning to thank and praise the Lord, and likewise at even,” KJV), speaking of the daily ritual of the Levites at the tabernacle.

The text was revised again for Ellerton’s Hymns Original and Translated (1888). Here, Ellerton changed 1.4 from “hallow now” to “sanctify,” and 5.3 from “But stand, and rule, and grow forever” to “Thy Kingdom stands, and grows forever.” The 1888 text was used when the hymn was printed in Hymns Ancient & Modern, Complete Ed. (1889) and elsewhere.

II. Text: Analysis

First and foremost, the hymn is a reflection of Ellerton’s convictions as a writer and editor:

Hymns may express adoration, thanksgiving, commemoration of God’s mercies; they may be prayers, penitential, supplicatory, intercessory; they may be devout aspirations after God; but in any case they must be forms of worship. It is not enough that they suggest devotion, they must be capable of expressing it.[2]

To that end, the opening stanza frames the evening ritual as a prayer directed toward God and an act of praise. This is part of a daily cycle, one orchestrated by God’s design, with the worshiper’s waking hours bookended by hymns. From there, the text shifts perspective. Literary scholar J.R. Watson explained the significance:

He saw the globe as we might imagine God seeing it, from outside, and hearing, as Ellerton himself imagined it, the endless sound of praise and prayer from those parts of the world which are temporarily in light. Somewhere in the world, someone is always praising God, and in this way the Church never sleeps.[3]

The second and third stanzas carry on this same perspective, describing the continuous waking and worshiping of Christians around the world. The final stanza conveys a different idea of perpetuity, one in which the kingdom of God never fades (Ps. 45:6, Ps. 145:13, Is. 9:7), unlike the kingdoms of the earth. The ending pictures the ultimate reign as in Philippians 2:10–11, in which “every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (ESV; see also Is. 45:23, Rom. 14:11, Rev. 5:13, 7:9). Another Scripture sometimes associated with the hymn is Psalm 113:3 (“From the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same the Lord's name is to be praised,” KJV).

Elsewhere, J.R. Watson saw another overarching theme behind the hymn:

It begins with Genesis and ends with Revelation. It starts with God, the giver of light and darkness (Genesis 1:3–4), and it ends with “all creatures” owning His sway (Revelation 5:13). It is a hymn which seems to draw into itself the beginning and the end of things, the patterns of morning and evening (both literally, and seen as a metaphor for life, which is why it is frequently used at funerals).[4]

Although the hymn was first printed in a guide for missionary services, it does not speak directly of evangelism, and while the British empire touched nearly every corner of the globe at that point in history, the writer was careful to distinguish between earthly empires and the kingdom of God, making the hymn more broadly useful for Christian worship outside of those contexts. As such, it is somewhat disingenuous to project an air of imperialism backward onto the hymn, as some commentators have done, including Erik Routley:

It was written as a missionary hymn, and it celebrates the bright and heroic story of missionary expansion during the nineteenth century. The remarkable thing about it, of course, is that it does so in just the same terms that you would have used, at that date, to celebrate the expansion of the British Empire. “An empire on which the sun never sets” is precisely the thought that is here adapted to Christian use.[5]

And yet Routley also put these words into proper perspective:

We may sing of a kingdom upon which the sun never sets, for there has always been a kingdom on which the sun never sets. . . . Let the hymn be sung always at the foot of the Cross, the Cross which is the mission from God to man, and all will be well.[6]

Modern hymnals often make accommodations for the archaisms in Ellerton’s language, generally trading “Thee,” “Thy,” and “Thou” for “you,” and replacing the gendered “brethren” for something non-gendered, like “people” or “children.” Thus the hymn is now often known as “The day you gave us, Lord, has ended.”

For a line-by-line Scripture analysis, see Wayne S. Walker (2008), and see additional references in Robert Cottrill (2011). For a more detailed literary analysis, see J.R. Watson (1983).

III. Tunes

The tune most closely associated with Ellerton’s text is ST. CLEMENT by Clement Scholefield (1839–1904). This was the first musical setting of the text, prepared for Church Hymns with Tunes (1874 | Fig. 5), edited by Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900). Scholefield’s tenure as curate of St. Peter’s, South Kensington (1869–1879), overlapped with Sullivan’s turn as organist (1867–1871). By one account, “He was extremely fond of music, though he had no systematic education in the art, but as a pianist he was far above the average player.”[7] The tune name was most likely a tongue-in-cheek nod by Sullivan to Scholefield, or it could be in reference to St. Clement’s Church in Scholefield’s hometown of Edgbaston, Birmingham, England, built in 1859, mostly demolished ca. 1978 (some ancillary structures still stand on Stuart Street). James T. Lightwood offered the interesting note, “After his death his estate was administered by the Court of Chancery, and pending an order being made the executors were for some time obliged to refuse all applications for the use of ST. CLEMENT.”[8]

Some scholars have wondered about the extent to which Sullivan aided Scholefield with the composition of the tune. The first to raise this concern was Mervyn Horder, who pointed out how Scholefield had contributed five other tunes to the 1874 collection, “none of them in triple time and none of them rising above the merely workmanlike,” but “take a dozen of Sullivan’s own tunes, and play them in succession with St. Clement somewhere in the middle of them, and see what a close fit it is musically.”[9] Sullivan scholar-biographer Ian Bradley has been inclined to agree; he similarly described Scholefield’s other known tunes as “undistinguished and unmemorable,” and he noted, using the observations of David Owen Norris, how the opening rise of a sixth can be found in Sullivan’s tune GOLDEN SHEAVES, and “This is a shape deeply embedded in Sullivan’s mind—it is found in the phrase ‘But it struck one chord of music’ in The Lost Chord and in the refrain to his song ‘Sweethearts.’”[10] Nonetheless, all scholars acknowledge the lack of documentary evidence for Sullivan’s possible involvement in Scholefield’s tune, and it could just as well be a result of inspiration or homage from Scholefield’s time working with the master composer.

The tune itself has been polarizing, variously loved and derided. It had been adopted into the 1889 edition of Hymns Ancient & Modern, but when that hymnal was overhauled in 1904, the editors replaced it with JOLDWYNS by Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924), which had been composed for that edition. When Sullivan’s friend William W. How complained about the substitution to W.H. Frere, the editor sniffed, “It is quite true that people like waltz-tunes but does the Bishop seriously hold that that is a reason for providing them?”[11] The ever-opinionated hymnologist Erik Routley once referred to ST. CLEMENT as “obstinately immortal.”[12] Bradley has dismissed the tune’s critics as “elitist.” Paul Westermeyer, who revised Routley’s history of Christian tunes, addressed the situation thusly:

That opening interval and the whole tune are regarded by some as archetypically cloying. What makes an upward major sixth and a tune more or less emotive and more or less objectionable is partly a matter of context and partly a matter of opinion. I see the sixth here—followed immediately up a second, then back down a second, and then up to the octave (and not preceded by repeated notes in order to prepare for a passionate leap)—as setting up a sweeping arc rather than creating an emotively open upward hole.[13]

A testament to the tune’s enduring popularity—in spite of its detractors—is the tune’s restoration and continued inclusion in Hymns Ancient & Modern, and its esteemed selection for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II (1926–2022) on 19 September 2022.

by CHRIS FENNER
for Hymnology Archive
28 September 2022

Note: Contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence of Queen Victoria using this hymn for her 6oth Jubilee in 1897. It was not included in Hymns for Use During 1897, nor was it in A Form of Thanksgiving to Be Used in St. Paul’s Cathedral, 20 June 1897, nor was it used in the brief outdoor ceremony in front of St. Paul’s on 22 June 1897 as described in Celebration of Her Majesty’s Jubilee, 1897. An email from Colin Parrish of the Royal Archives, 8 Nov. 2022, agrees: “I have now searched through our records but I am unable to find any reference to the singing of ‘The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended’.”

Footnotes:

1. Henry Housman, John Ellerton (1896), p. 36: HathiTrust

2. Henry Housman, John Ellerton (1896), pp. 228–229: HathiTrust

3. J.R. Watson, The English Hymn (Oxford: University Press, 1997), p. 39.

4. J.R. Watson, “The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended,” An Annotated Anthology of Hymns (2002), pp. 342–343.

5. Erik Routley, “Empire: The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended,” Hymns and the Faith (London: John Murray, 1955), p. 258. Albert Edward Bailey (1950), p. 427, also conflated the hymn with British imperialism.

6. Erik Routley, Hymns and the Faith (1955), p. 261.

7. James T. Lightwood, “St. Clement,” The Music of the Methodist Hymn-Book, 3rd ed. (1950), p. 386.

8. James T. Lightwood, “St. Clement,” The Music of the Methodist Hymn-Book, 3rd ed. (1950), p. 386.

9. Mervyn Horder, “A note on ST. CLEMENT,” HSGBI Bulletin (July 1994), pp. 67–68.

10. Ian Bradley, “Trust in God and Christian Soldiers,” HSGBI Bulletin, vol. 20, no. 5 (Winter 2013), pp. 182–184.

11. A letter from How to Frere, 21 June 1897, in the Hymns Ancient & Modern archives, as quoted by Bradley in Lost Chords (2013), p. 202.

12. Erik Routley, The Music of Christian Hymns (Chicago: GIA, 1981), p. 107.

13. Paul Westermeyer, Let the People Sing: Hymn Tunes in Perspective (Chicago: GIA, 2005), p. 259.

Related Resources:

John Ellerton, “The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended,” Church Hymns . . . with Notes and Illustrations (London: SPCK, 1881), p. xxxii: HathiTrust

John Julian, “John Ellerton,” A Dictionary of Hymnology (London: J. Murray, 1892), pp. 327–328: HathiTrust

Albert Edward Bailey, “The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended,” The Gospel in Hymns (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), p. 427.

James T. Lightwood, “St. Clement,” The Music of the Methodist Hymn-Book, 3rd ed. (London: Epworth Press, 1950), p. 386.

Erik Routley, “Empire: The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended,” Hymns and the Faith (London: John Murray, 1955), pp. 257–261.

J.R. Watson, “The day thou gavest,” Bulletin, HSGBI, vol. 10, no. 6 (Sept. 1983), pp. 144–150.

Mervyn Horder, “A note on ST. CLEMENT,” Bulletin, HSGBI (July 1994), pp. 67–68.

J.R. Watson, “The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended,” An Annotated Anthology of Hymns (Oxford: University Press, 2002), pp. 342–344.

Edward Darling & Donald Davison, “The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended,” Companion to Church Hymnal (Dublin: Columba, 2005), pp. 135–136.

Wayne S. Walker, “The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended,” Hymn Studies Blog (5 Nov. 2008): HSB

Paul Westermeyer, “The day you gave us, Lord, has ended,” Hymnal Companion to Evangelical Lutheran Worship (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2010), pp. 401, 406.

Robert Cottrill, “The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended,” Wordwise Hymns (2 Nov. 2011): WH

Ian Bradley, “Trust in God and Christian soldiers: The hymn tunes of Arthur Sullivan,” Bulletin, HSGBI, vol. 20, no. 5 (Winter 2013), pp. 175–188.

Ian Bradley, “Sullivan’s possible involvement in ST CLEMENT,” Lost Chords and Christian Soldiers: The Sacred Music of Sir Arthur Sullivan (London: SCM Press, 2013), pp. 201–204.

Carl P. Daw Jr., “The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended,” Glory to God: A Companion (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2016), pp. 644–645.

David Rogner & Joe Herl, “The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended,” Lutheran Service Book Companion to the Hymns, vol. 1 (St. Louis: Concordia, 2019), pp. 1395–1397.

“The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended,” Hymnary.org: https://hymnary.org/text/the_day_thou_gavest_lord_is_ended

David Pym, “The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended,” Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology: CDH