"Haste" laid waste

Yesterday at the Anglican, ex-Episcopal church I attend, we sang the hymn "O Zion, Haste". We still use the Episcopal hymnal, however, and bumped again into the ECUSA's bowdlerization of the hymn texts. Our "O Zion, Haste" reflected two obnoxious ECUSA revisions:

1. The first stanza of the hymn actually says: "... That He who made all nations is not willing / One soul should perish, lost in shades of night." ECUSA's editor apparently couldn't bear to hint at Hell by referring to anyone "perishing" or being "lost," so the text we sang went something like "...one soul should fail to know His love and might." The original text alludes to 2 Peter 3:9 ("The Lord is ... not willing that any should perish"), but the ECUSA revision loses this--and thereby loses the chance to teach that, while Hell is a real threat, it is not what our loving God wants.

The ECUSA version had to leave out altogether, as irreformable, the stanzas that begin, "Behold how many thousands still are lying / Bound in the darksome prison house of sin" and "’Tis thine to save from peril of perdition / The souls for whom the Lord His life laid down". They presented an insuperable challenge to the revisers, and could not be forced into the universalist Unitarian mold. A reading of the entirety of this original text gives a sense that its author, Mary A. Thompson, simply had a different religion from the one that prevails in ECUSA, and that it was almost dishonest to include this hymn in the ECUSA hymnal, which would better accommodate "O Zion, Take Your Time".

2. The next-to-last stanza actually begins, "Give of thy sons to bear the message glorious; / Give of thy wealth to speed them on their way...." Anyone who has a son may well be arrested by this call--and should be. Mary Thompson wrote the text one night while sitting up with a child who had typhoid fever; and in that personal context the notion of giving one's sons is not at all abstract. 19th-century missionaries sometimes died (of typhoid or God knows what else) and were buried on the field, so a farewell to a departing missionary son had to be assumed a likely final farewell.

The ECUSA version, however, is sadly de-personalized, and says something like "Send heralds forth to bear the message glorious ...." I suppose this was done to make it gender-neutral and to make the daughters not feel excluded--but the cost to the text is too great, and somehow the evangelical churches that sang this hymn in its unrevised form for its first hundred years managed to send plenty of daughters to the mission field--perhaps more daughters than sons, in fact. I think most of those daughters felt that in a generic way they were included among the "sons", which of course they were.

But my favorite ECUSA revision came up a week earlier, on Trinity Sunday: The original text for "Holy, Holy, Holy" says, "though the eye of sinful man Thy glory may not see"--but the vigilant ECUSA editors rendered it, "though the sinful human eye Thy glory may not see." At this point in the hymn, I often nudge my wife and assure her, "Women are sinful, too." I'm happy to report that I think she feels included in the Fall.