O God, Our Help in Ages Past

Lyrics

O God, our help in ages past,
our hope for years to come,
our shelter from the stormy blast,
and our eternal home;

Under the shadow of thy throne
thy saints have dwelt secure;
sufficient is thine arm alone,
and our defence is sure.

Before the hills in order stood,
or earth received her frame,
from everlasting thou art God,
to endless years the same.

A thousand ages in thy sight
are like an evening gone;
short as the watch that ends the night
before the rising sun.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
bears all its sons away;
they fly forgotten, as a dream
dies at the opening day.

O God, our help in ages past,
our hope for years to come,
be thou our guard while troubles last,
and our eternal home.

History

"O God, our help in ages past" is Isaac Watts's metrical paraphrase of Psalm 90. Watts (born in Southampton on 17 July 1674, died at Stoke Newington on 25 November 1748) was a Congregational minister from a nonconformist family. The paraphrase was published in 1719 in his The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, which recast the psalms from a Christian standpoint. Under the title "Man Frail, and God Eternal" it ran to nine four-line stanzas in common metre, and the six-stanza selection now commonly sung omits three of them. Sources differ on when Watts composed it: 1708, or around 1714.

The first line did not originally read as it does today. Watts began "Our God, our help in ages past"; John Wesley's Collection of Psalms and Hymns altered it to "O God, our help". Wesley also revised several other stanzas.

The tune most often sung with the words is ST ANNE, attributed to William Croft, who was organist of St Anne's Church, Soho, and later of Westminster Abbey. It first appeared anonymously in 1708 in the sixth edition of the Supplement to the New Version of the Psalms, set to a different psalm text; no firm documentation of Croft's authorship exists, and the tune was first joined to Watts's words in 1861, in Hymns Ancient and Modern. The tune has since been borrowed and echoed by other composers, among them Handel, Sullivan and Vaughan Williams.

The hymn has long been associated with national and civic occasions in Britain and Canada. It is regularly sung at Remembrance services, including the Remembrance Sunday service at the Cenotaph in London, and it was sung at Winston Churchill's funeral.

Performance

This is the St Martin's Voices recording of the hymn (the description credits St Martin's Voices of St Martin-in-the-Fields as the artist), titled "O God our help in ages past | Hymn with Lyrics". It runs about 3 minutes and was published to the church channel on 7 June 2023.

Sources: hymnary.org · en.wikipedia.org · St Martin's Voices recording and Words book