Christ, Whose Glory Fills the Skies

Lyrics

Christ, whose glory fills the skies,
Christ, the true, the only light,
sun of righteousness, arise,
triumph o'er the shades of night;
day-spring from on high, be near;
day-star, in my heart appear.

Dark and cheerless is the morn
unaccompanied by thee:
joyless is the day's return,
till thy mercy's beams I see,
till they inward light impart,
glad my eyes, and warm my heart.

Visit then this soul of mine;
pierce the gloom of sin and grief;
fill me, radiancy divine;
scatter all my unbelief;
more and more thyself display,
shining to the perfect day.

History

Charles Wesley (1707-1788) wrote this hymn as a morning hymn. It was first published in John and Charles Wesley's Hymns and Sacred Poems (1740), in three stanzas of six lines, under the title 'A Morning Hymn'.

The hymn had a curious early publishing history. In 1776 Augustus M. Toplady included it, unaltered, in his Psalms and Hymns, and for many years it was quoted as Toplady's own composition before the attribution was corrected. It was chiefly through the advocacy of Toplady and of the hymn-writer James Montgomery that the text came into extensive use in the Church of England and among Nonconformists. Montgomery regarded it as 'one of Charles Wesley's loveliest progeny'.

The hymn is saturated in the scriptural imagery of Christ as light. Among the more than thirty biblical references Hymnary.org lists for the text are Malachi 4:2 and Luke 1:78 — the prophetic pictures of the rising sun and the dawn from on high — alongside John 8:12, 2 Peter 1:19, Psalm 27 and Isaiah 60:1-3. That cluster of dawn and daylight images is what has kept the hymn firmly in the morning-worship repertoire from its first publication to the present day.

Performance

The tune most frequently paired with this text is RATISBON, a German melody associated with Johann Gottlob Werner's Choralbuch of 1815; Hymnary.org also traces older German roots for the melody (Freylinghausen's Geistreiches Gesangbuch, 1704) and credits William Henry Havergal (1793-1870) with the harmonisation found in many hymnals. RATISBON appears in some 160 hymnals and remains the standard setting in most modern books.

A well-established alternative is HEATHLANDS by Henry Thomas Smart (1813-1879), published in Psalms and Hymns for Divine Worship (1866); a third setting, LUX PRIMA by Charles Gounod, appeared in the Scottish Hymnary of 1872. All three tunes share the hymn's 7.7.7.7.7.7 metre.

Liturgically the hymn belongs to morning worship — it was titled 'A Morning Hymn' at its first publication.

Sources: hymnary.org