Reginald Heber (1783-1826) was a timid boy kept frail by the best medical quackery of the day. When he suffered from pneumonia, the doctor prescribed bleeding. Reginald survived, but was never robust. One thing is certain; he never suffered brain damage. He became so familiar with the Bible as a child that his father, who was a preacher, would turn to him when he could not remember where a particular Bible passage was found. When he was barely more than five, he was asked, “Where was Moses when the candle went out?” At once he answered, “On Mount Nebo, for there he died, and it may be said that his lamp of life went out.”
Reginald’s father was both wealthy and learned, and these benefits he passed on to his sons. The oldest son, Richard, had accumulated an immense library. The result was that young Reginald had every advantage in terms of education–advantages that were not trifled away. Richard said, “Reginald did more than read books, he devoured them.”
Evidently, young Reginald was saved before he went to study at Oxford where he graduated with honors. One benefit he received while at Oxford was discipline. He and a friend determined to rise early, and spend two hours in private meditation before they met the rigors of their studies. Taking time to be alone with God made every other minute of the day that much more precious.
His academic career had been so brilliant that it was obvious to everyone that Heber would quickly move on to a lucrative career, or reach after fame in the literary world. His compositions had won a number of awards. But the contemplative young man decided instead to take time after graduation to travel throughout Europe. Reaching a decision as to his future, in 1807 he was ordained in the Church of England, and succeeded his father as rector of Hodnet, Shropshire. Writer William Thackeray said that those years at Hodnet were spent “…counselling the people in their troubles, advising them in their difficulties, comforting them in their distress, kneeling often at their sickbeds at the hazard of his own health, exhorting, encouraging where there was need; where there was strife, the peacemaker; where there was want, the free-giver.”
In 1809, Reginald married Amelia Shipley. In 1812, he was appointed prebendary of St. Asaph, and in three years was appointed Bampton Lecturer at Oxford. He said, “I am indeed a prosperous man, who has unremitted causes of gratitude, and whose principal apprehension ought to be, that he has a greater share of earthly happiness than he knows how to manage.”
By this time, he had published his poem, Palestine, and many of his hymns had found their way into print. If appreciating poetry requires a sensitive nature, then an amplified sensitivity is required to write it. This quality is in high demand in a day when, “the love of many shall wax cold.” According to our Lord, it is not the sorrows of life that blunt our emotions. Rather it is the sensory bombardment of “iniquity” that this generation swims in that makes us so numb and tearless.
Heber was preeminently a man of solitude, who shunned the sensual. By keeping his heart with all diligence, he developed the ability to pluck on our heartstrings, too. This was not some genetic accident. Rather it was the outcome of a man taught in God’s own school. For instance, the lines of his hymn, “Thou art gone to the grave, but we will not deplore thee,” were composed in December of 1818 after the death of his first child, who was only six months old. Heber wrote, “I am myself more cut down than I thought I should be, but I hope not impatient. I do not forget that to have possessed her at all, and to have enjoyed the pleasure of looking at her, and caressing her, for six months, was God’s free gift, and still less do I forget that He who has taken her will at length, I hope, restore her to us.”
Heber was not afraid to express the morbid facts in his work. His art was not used as escapism from the grim face of death. In his hymn, Beneath our feet and o’er our head, the fourth stanza reads:
Their names are graven on the stone,
Their bones are in the clay;
And ere another day is done,
Ourselves may be as they.
From another hymn we read:
The earth rings hollow from below,
And warns thee of her dead!
In 1822, Heber became the preacher at Lincoln’s Inn, a “plum” to any Anglican clergyman. But a year later, when Bishop Middleton died, he was asked by the archbishop of Canterbury to replace him as the second bishop of Calcutta. Reginald had read The Life of Henry Martyn, and the spirit of that martyr missionary to India glowed within him. Heber soon sailed for the appointment.
Heber’s voyage was in itself an evangelistic opportunity with his fellow travellers. One sixteen-year-old British soldier who was evidently converted at that time was Arthur Conolly, who was later beheaded in 1842 as a British officer in the Central Asian town of Bokhara. In Peter Hopkirk’s book, The Great Game, about empire building in Central Asia, he writes about Captain Arthur Conolly who “possessed one further quality which was to have a bearing on his career. Like many other officers of that time, he had a strongly religious nature. In his case, however, this had been heightened during the long sea voyage out to India by contact with the charismatic Reginald Heber, the celebrated hymnwriter and newly appointed Bishop of Calcutta.”
We know that Conolly was a missionary-minded believer, but we can only surmise whether Conolly’s testimony for Christ caused his career in Turkestan to be, shall we say, cut short. The lines of Heber’s hymn, The Son of God Goes Forth to War, were lived out in Conolly’s life and violent end. Hopkirk tells how, after digging his own grave, and then watching as his fellow prisoner was beheaded, the executioner “turned to Conolly and informed him that the Emir had offered to spare his life if he would renounce Christianity and embrace Islam. Aware that Stoddart’s forcible conversion had not saved him from imprisonment and death, Conolly, a devout Christian, replied: ‘Colonel Stoddart has been a Mussulman for three years and you have killed him. I will not become one, and I am ready to die.’ He then stretched out his neck for the execution, and a moment later his head rolled in the dust beside that of his friend.”
They met the tyrant’s brandished steel,
The lion’s gory mane;
They bowed their necks the death to feel:
Who follows in their train?
They climbed the steep ascent of heaven
Through peril, toil, and pain:
O God, to us may grace be given
To follow in their train.
This new climate took its toll. Heber hardly gave himself a chance to adapt. The authority of the bishop stretched over all of India, Ceylon, Mauritius, and Australasia. The “field was big, the task was heavy, and helpers few.” Already in 1824 he toured the mission stations in northern Bengal, Bombay, and Ceylon. This tour took sixteen months. Then in February of 1826, he began that fateful tour of the mission work in southern India. In Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu, he heard 1,300 national believers, who had been “rescued from the pollution of their heathen idolatry, now joining in singing the sentiments of the 100th Psalm:
We’ll crowd Thy gates with joyful songs,
High as the heavens our voices raise;
And earth, with her ten thousand tongues,
Shall fill Thy courts with sounding praise.
Heber said, “For the last ten years I have longed to witness a scene like this, but the reality exceeds all my expectation. Gladly would I exchange years of common life for one such day as this.” He got to Tiruchirapalli in April. Returning to his dwelling on a steamy tropical afternoon, after attending a meeting of the believers, he asked to take a cool bath. While soaking himself, he suffered a stroke and died. His servant, surprised by the delay, opened the door and found him dead. He was just eighteen days short of his forty-third birthday.
Dr. John Julian said, “No memory of Indian annals is holier that that of the three years of ceaseless travel, splendid administration, and saintly enthusiasm” of Reginald Heber.
Most of what we have of his writings and poetry were edited and published by his able wife after his death. He wrote many poems, and about fifty-seven hymns. Among the most familiar in the churches are Holy, Holy, Holy. The tune that is generally used for it was named Nicea. It was composed by Dr. Dykes in honor of the church council in ad 325 that was held in Nicea in Asia Minor. It was there that challenges of the Arians about Christ’s eternal Sonship and equality with the Father were answered. Down through the centuries the saints have looked back at that conference and have thanked God that the great doctrines of the Holy Trinity were there clearly stated.
Holy, Holy, Holy, is one of those hymns that has been objected to for doctrinal reasons, though most hymnbook editors conclude that rewording the old hymns is “trifling,” and “that the game of trimming the hymns to fit the theory is not worth the candle.” Still, this hymn is criticized because of the phrase, “though the darkness hide Thee.” Objectors point out that “we are not come unto the mount that might not be touched” where Jehovah was hid in the dense clouds and thick darkness. Now in the blaze of New Testament revelation, we discover that “God dwells in the light, that no man can approach unto, that no man has seen or can see.”
In answer to this objection, we acknowledge that these distinctions between the Old and New Testaments cannot be emphasized enough, but we would also remind any revisers that though God dwells in light unapproachable, still men dwell in darkness, and that even the children of light still “see through a glass darkly.” Besides the predicament of our condition, on God’s side we read that, “the darkness and the light are both alike to Thee.”
The story of From Greenland’s Icy Mountains is told by Christopher Knapp in his excellent little book, Who Wrote Our Hymns. Dean Shipley (Heber’s father-in-law) “was to preach a sermon in aid of the ‘Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts,’ and as they sat together with friends in the vicarage, Dr. Shipley asked Heber, ‘Write something for us to sing at our morning service.’ Heber retired from the table where they sat and wrote in another part of the room. A short time after Dr. Shipley asked, ‘And what have you written?’ Heber had already composed the first three stanzas, and read them. ‘There, that will do,’ exclaimed Dr. Shipley. ‘No, no,’ replied Heber; ‘the sense is not complete,’ and went to add the fourth and final stanza,” commencing, Waft, waft, ye winds the story.
This hymn was penned on the inspiration of the moment. Only one change was made in the copy, changing “savage” to “heathen,” and the manuscript was rushed to the printer. The hymn was so renowned that Heber’s hand-written original was shown at the World’s Exhibition of 1851 in London.
Heber was an ardent defender of the fundamentals of the faith. It was this belief in the eternal realities of heaven and hell, and of the value of the blood of Christ to cleanse, that made him so passionate for missions. That said, we have to be honest and tell you that he was a high-churchman, and a political Tory. His abhorrence of Calvinism pushed him into the Arminian camp. Though his friends looked down on the uncouth Methodists, desenters and evangelicals, certainly Heber’s poems have a decided evangelical flavor. All that said, we do not sing his hymns because of his ecclesiastical associations. And the happy fact has since emerged that the ones who revel in Reginald’s hymns are the fundamentalist, and evangelical Christians. Reginald Heber was a gift to the whole church of Christ. Unlike other hymnwriters who bear the responsibility for dozens, even hundreds of mediocre poetic offerings, it can be said that every one of Heber’s hymns have recognized merit and have at one time or another been in common usage.
Are departed saints aware of happenings on earth? If so, then dear brother Heber would have had a lot of rejoicing as he heard his hymns sung. In the revival of 1858, a number of sailors were converted on board the North Caroline, a frigate in the US Navy. As they told one another their testimonies, they discovered that they came from ten different countries, and when the last man stated that he had been born in Greenland, the sailors spontaneously began Heber’s well-known missionary hymn.
This material was gathered from the following:
Life of Reginald Heber by Amelia Heber
The Life of Bishop Heber by Thomas Taylor
Hymns and Their Writers by Jack Strahan, Gospel Tract Publications
Who Wrote Our Hymns by Christopher Knapp, Bible Truth Publishers
English Hymns: Their Authors and History by Samuel Buffield, Funk & Wagnalls
The English Hymn by Louis F. Benson, Hodder & Stoughton
Illustrated History of Hymns and Their Authors by Edwin M. Long
The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk, Kodansha International