Archive | December 2018

New Year’s Hymn

Dec30

New Year’s Hymn

Join your voices, youth rejoices,
New Year hymns again to sing;
For our new and many mercies,
Lord, our heartfelt praise we bring.
Summer flowers have bloomed and faded,
Summer hours have come and fled;
By Thy care we still are aided,
By Thy hand we still are fed.

Refrain
Lord of glory! we adore Thee
Now before Thee in another year;
May Thy heav’nly love abiding,
Be on every scholar here.

Thou hast kept us, God of glory,
Since the last New Year began;
Still proclaiming the sweet story,
Of Thy wondrous love to man.
Shall we longer keep Him waiting,
Who for us hath waited long?
He to whom both soul and body,
Heart and life, and all belong?

Refrain

From this moment, Holy Jesus,
May our hearts be wholly Thine!
Then we’ll sing that best of praises,
“I am His, and He is mine.”
Jesus! by Thy blood and Spirit,
May we all Thy children be,
Then in Thee we shall inherit
Happiness eternally.
Refrain

Words: Anonymous
Music: Harry Sanders (1888)
Photo: Marge McCoy

It Came Upon the Midnight Clear

Dec23

It Came Upon the Midnight Clear

It came upon the midnight clear,
that glorious song of old,
from angels bending near the earth
to touch their harps of gold:
“Peace on the earth, good will to men,
from heaven’s all-gracious King.”
The world in solemn stillness lay,
to hear the angels sing.

Still through the cloven skies they come
with peaceful wings unfurled,
and still their heavenly music floats
o’er all the weary world;
above its sad and lowly plains,
they bend on hovering wing,
and ever o’er its Babel sounds
the blessed angels sing.

For lo! the days are hastening on,
by prophet seen of old,
when with the ever-circling years
shall come the time foretold
when peace shall over all the earth
its ancient splendors fling,
and the whole world send back the song
which now the angels sing.

Text: Edmund H. Sears
Music: Richard Storrs Willis
Audio: Stephen Sollars
Photo: Ruth Diane Handley Domigan