“Let all the world in every corner sing: My God and King.”

On a summer evening forty years ago, the choir and congregation of Thomas Coats Memorial Church, Paisley, sang a Seventeenth Century hymn by George Herbert. The sun slanted through the lightly tinted stain glass windows, falling across the chancel. Old oak choir stalls and angels glowed in mellow golds of shafted sunlight. The Hill organ was played by Derek Norval who also conducted the choir. The word magical is too easy and lazy to describe those few minutes of heavenly music – mystical, mysterious, glorious – or perhaps gracious, in the theologically charged sense of full of grace, or as a personal experience, touched by grace.

Here are the words of the hymn we sang:

1 Let all the world in every corner sing:
My God and King!
The heavens are not too high,
His praise may thither fly;
The earth is not too low,
His praises there may grow.
Let all the world in every corner sing:
My God and King!

2 Let all the world in every corner sing:
My God and King!
The church with psalms must shout,
No door can keep them out;
But, more than all, the heart
Must bear the largest part.
Let all the world in every corner sing:
My God and King!

Praise is a recurring theme and a repeated exhortation woven within and throughout The Temple, Herbert's collection of poems. The two line refrain is both urgent and expansive. Leaving aside the advancing knowledge of cosmology from Galileo's telescope onwards, Herbert's invitation to praise and worship goes out to all four corners of the globe. And the four word acclamation, "My God and King",  is the distilled theology of the Psalms. The repeated refrain injects into the text "the steady massiveness of a group collectively affirming a premeditated truth." ¹

The first verse acknowledges a two dimensional way of seeing the world and the cosmos, the heavens and the earth, above and below. The second verse is similarly bi-focal, the church and the heart, the congregation and the individual, the liturgical and the personal. Together they gather the diversities of human experience and earthly existence into the choral praise of creation and humanity; it is creation praise in a cosmic nutshell -"Let all the world in every corner sing: My God and King."

As often in Herbert's poems, the psalter provides the poet with vocabulary for praise. "The church with psalms must shout!" That surprising word 'shout' recalls familiar exhortations: "Let us make a joyful noise…let us come into his presence with thanksgiving, let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise." (Psalm 95.1-2; cf. Ps 100) As one of Herbert's more recent editors notes with reference to the word 'shout' as used by Herbert, he probably had in mind memories of "the inelegant sound of a rustic congregation bellowing the metrical psalms in the barbarous Sternhold and Hopkins translation often included in copies of the Book of Common Prayer." ²

The wings of praise enable all voices to fly joyfully upwards and towards God, while the praises of earth and soil and all creation, accompanied by human voices, grow upwards. This is an interesting view of praise as a spiritual discipline that in its practice and exuberance, encourages and fertilises spiritual growth. Not only so. Praise is made imperative in verse 2, "The church with psalms must shout." Praise is the beating heart of a Christian community, a sign of communal cardiac health in relation to God. The doors can be closed but the music will be heard anyway, praise will ascend, a joyful noise will be made. The peace of God may well pass all understanding, but in heaven praise is always a welcome interruption!

But then again, not only so. It is the heart that must sustain the music, and creates and carries the energy and devotion that vitalises and renders worthy of God "the joyful noise of praise and thanksgiving." All the world, every corner, heaven and earth, each church and every heart, a full orchestration of creation praise making symphony to the one who is "My God and King."

But the Church's praise must include the communal and the personal, chorus and solo. And the solo part is the 'larger part', demanding of skill and effort, and the ability to sustain the music. And just in case the soloist forgets their place, Bloch is right in his reminder: "Antiphon 1 tells us that the heart does not sing solo; its song is always heard against a chorus of many voices."⁴

"Let all the world in every corner sing:

My God and King!

These were the words we sang on a June evening 40 years ago, with a robed choir, a Hill organ, a small but engaged congregation, in a large nonconformist replica cathedral with magnificent acoustics, in fading sunlight softening towards evening. George Herbert would have loved it!   

1. Nicholas Jones, "Text and Context: Two Languages in George Herbert's Poetry, Studies in Philology, Vol. 79.2, 1982, p.166.
2. ^{George Herbert. The Complete Poetry. John Drury, Penguin Classics. 2015. page 393.}
3. The photo above is the architect's own drawing of the church as it was conceived and subsequently built. His name was Hippolyte Blanc. 
4. Chana Bloch, George Herbert and the Spelling of the Word. University of California Press, 1985. p.245.