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The Ukrainian roots of Britain’s favourite hymn, ‘How great thou art’
By Jonathan Clark, Premier Lifeline22 April 20222 min read
Consistently voted one of the most popular hymns of all time, ‘How great thou art’ was translated from Russian by Stuart Hine. The British missionary first heard the song in the Ukrainian mountains.
Stuart Hine was a missionary to Poland during the interwar period, in the 1920s and 30s. He and his wife spent many years in Eastern Europe, devoting their time to sharing their faith with the people they met. Part of that time was spent in the Carpathian Mountains (pictured, above) in what is now Ukraine. They travelled by bike to remote mountain villages, got to know the people there and shared their faith.
MY CONNECTION
Hine was an incredibly inspirational man. How do I know that? Because after the second world war, when he had returned to the UK, he became my parents’ youth leader and, in many ways, their mentor in their Christian faith.
I grew up being told stories about Stuart, his wife and his family, and all that they’d experienced; of how he had practiced his hymns on their youth group, and encouraged them to do things which were beyond their comfort zone – much like Stuart’s own missionary adventures to the Ukraine and, many years later, my own. Through those stories, and my trips to Ukraine, I developed a deep love for the country and it’s people.
IT WAS INSPIRED BY HIS OBSERVATIONS OF THE JOY WITH WHICH THE UKRAINIAN PEOPLE RESPONDED TO THE GOSPEL
Over the next fourteen years, he added four further verses of his own, and first published it in his gospel magazine Grace and Peace in 1949. Since then, there have been over 1,700 documented versions of the song recorded, including Elvis Presley’s famous 1967 version (and album of the same name) and it has been sung by performers including Dolly Parton, Cliff Richard, Jennifer Hudson, Carrie Underwood and John Mayer. It has been consistently voted one of the most popular hymns of the 20th Century.
INSPIRED BY JOY
The third verse of the hymn was inspired by Hine’s observations of the joy with which the Ukrainian people received and responded to the gospel of Christ. It was based on his own experience in those remote Ukrainian villages in the Carpathian Mountains. The fourth verse, which begins: “When Christ shall come / With shouts of acclamation” is very much looking to the future.
After the second world war ended, Hine spent some time looking after refugees who arrived in Britain and were separated from their families. That fourth verse is dedicated to them - to the refugees who didn’t know when they’d see their families again. It’s a verse full of hope, a verse that looks to the future. The two final verses are often not usually sung. But in this moment, as the conflict in Ukraine continues to rage, it seems particularly meaningful:
When burdens press, and seem beyond endurance, Bowed down with grief, to Him I lift my face; And then in love He brings me sweet assurance: ‘My child! for thee sufficient is my grace’
Jonathan Clark discusses 'How great thou art' on Sunday Night Live
In this current time, my heart goes out to my many friends and contacts in Ukraine. I am in contact with them daily. Some have had to flee for their lives, some remain trapped in their homes. Others are receiving people and responding to their needs. My prayer is that peace will return and that the nation of Ukraine will experience the joy which only Jesus can bring.
I pray that God will move in his people and protect them. But more than that, I pray he will be with people across the region – in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and all the countries receiving refugees. May God move in those situations, may he bless the people there and may he bring about a change, so that his will is done in Eastern Europe.
Jonathan ClarkJonathan Clark is the Director of Premier Lifeline
EU leaders agreed on a partial Russian oil embargo late on Monday (30 May) at the summit in Brussels, after weeks of negotiations and pushing back from the Hungarian government. Read on »
42 “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on him, and he will bring justice to the nations. 2 He will not shout or cry out, or raise his voice in the streets. 3 A bruised reed he will not break, and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out. In faithfulness he will bring forth justice; 4 he will not falter or be discouraged till he establishes justice on earth. In his teaching the islands will put their hope.”
5 This is what God the Lord says— the Creator of the heavens, who stretches them out, who spreads out the earth with all that springs from it, who gives breath to its people, and life to those who walk on it: 6 “I, the Lord, have called you in righteousness; I will take hold of your hand. I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles, 7 to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.
8 “I am the Lord; that is my name! I will not yield my glory to another or my praise to idols. 9 See, the former things have taken place, and new things I declare; before they spring into being I announce them to you.”
The liberal elite's no-holds-barred attitude to sex is a danger to children: That's the alarming message in the final part of a series that dares to expose the legacy of our anything-goes culture.
The much ridiculed campaigner Mary Whitehouse is one of history’s losers. Born in 1910, she never let go of her Edwardian sensibilities, even as the society she knew collapsed around her ears.
She spent 37 years organising letter-writing campaigns in an effort to halt the arrival of what she called ‘the permissive society’, horrified as she was by the displays of sex and violence that suddenly appeared on British television screens from the 1960s onwards.
A contemporary of hers described her as ‘a little Canute, exhorting the waves of moral turpitude to retreat’. She didn’t campaign for change, she campaigned for stasis. And she failed utterly, in a grand display of public humiliation.
Some of her concerns look rather silly now. She and her fellow campaigners expended a huge amount of energy on the kind of sauciness that nowadays seems quaint. The double entendres in songs such as Chuck Berry’s My Ding-a-Ling and sitcoms such as It Ain’t Half Hot Mum all provoked letters, as did a suggestively placed microphone during Mick Jagger’s appearance on Top Of The Pops.
Louise Perry makes the case that the sexual revolution went to fair, evoking the treatment of mocked 20th century activist Mary Whitehouse
One of her first forays into public life was an anonymous 1953 piece for The Sunday Times that advised mothers on how best to inhibit homosexuality in their sons. This open homophobia was combined with a crusade against blasphemy.
In 1977, she pursued a private prosecution against Gay News for printing a poem that described a Roman centurion fantasising about having sex with the body of the crucified Christ. The editor was convicted of blasphemous libel, and the QC who represented him later wrote that Whitehouse’s ‘fear of homosexuals was visceral’. He may well have been right.
Her reputation as a bigoted fuddy-duddy means that, if Whitehouse is remembered now, it is usually as a punchline. And indeed in her own lifetime she was the subject of constant ridicule.
One of her books was ritually burned on a BBC sitcom, her name was used in jest as the title of the hit comedy show The Mary Whitehouse Experience, and a porn star mockingly changed her name to ‘Mary Whitehouse’ by deed poll (this second Mary Whitehouse later committed suicide).
Sir Hugh Greene, director-general of the BBC between 1960 and 1969, openly despised Whitehouse so much that he purchased a grotesque naked portrait of her to hang in his office. The story goes that he would vent his frustration by throwing darts at the portrait, squealing with delight if he managed to hit one of her six breasts depicted in the painting.
Arch-progressive Owen Jones, a columnist at The Guardian, is among those who now use Whitehouse’s name as shorthand for being ‘on the wrong side of history’. For those wedded to the permissive society, she is villainy incarnate.
But this historical narrative only works if one is deliberately selective.
Whitehouse has found herself condemned by ‘history’ on the issues of homosexuality, blasphemy and the phallic use of microphones on Top Of The Pops. But on one issue she was remarkably prescient. She was one of the few public figures of her day who gave a damn about child sexual abuse.
At the same time as Sir Hugh Greene was lobbing darts at her naked portrait, his organisation, the BBC, was enabling abuses perpetrated against women and children by many famous men, including, most notoriously, TV presenter Jimmy Savile.
It was only after Savile died, unpunished, in 2011 that the scale of his crimes became clear. It is now believed that, over the course of at least 40 years, BBC staff turned a blind eye to the rape and sexual assault of up to 1,000 girls and boys by Savile in the Corporation’s changing rooms and studios.
He abused many more victims, young and old, male and female, in hospitals, schools and anywhere else he could seek them out. His celebrity status enabled his sexual aggression, allowing him access to vulnerable victims, particularly children, and discouraging investiga
Savile made little effort to conceal what he got up to and, indeed, would often joke about it. Answering the phone to journalists, he would apparently greet them, unprompted, with the phrase ‘She told me she was over 16’, which was invariably met with nervous laughter.
In his autobiography, published in 1974, he admitted to some of his crimes, writing of a time before he became a TV presenter when he had been running nightclubs in the north of England and a police officer asked him to look out for a young girl who had run away from a home for juvenile offenders.
Savile told the officer that, if the girl showed up at one of his clubs, he would be sure to hand her over to the authorities — ‘but I’ll keep her all night first as my reward’. The girl did show up and he did spend the night with her, but no criminal action was ever taken. Savile told this story openly, as if it were funny, and seemingly without fear of consequences.
When the Savile scandal broke in the early 2010s, the same refrain was repeated by commentators again and again: ‘It was a different time.’ And indeed it was, although we sometimes forget quite how different attitudes towards child sexual abuse really were during the 1970s and 1980s.
In Britain, members of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) were openly campaigning for the abolition of the age of consent and found themselves welcomed warmly in some Establishment circles.
In the United States, NAMBLA (the ‘North American Man/Boy Love Association’) was founded at the end of the 1970s and attracted support from figures including the poet Allen Ginsberg.
In some European countries at this time, child pornography was freely available, having been legalised at the same time as other forms of pornography from the end of the 1960s.
In hyper-liberal Sweden, it emerged that the Royal Library in Stockholm was in possession of a collection of child pornography acquired between 1971 and 1980 and still being loaned to members of the public into the 21st century.
In 1977, a petition to the French parliament calling for the decriminalisation of sex between adults and children was signed by a long list of famous intellectuals including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir and Michel Foucault.
All of these figures are now the ones who find themselves on the wrong side of history after the 1990s saw a sharp swing back against efforts to normalise paedophilia.
Back in the 1970s it was primarily conservatives who opposed groups such as PIE, with Mary Whitehouse, for instance, lobbying hard for the Private Member’s Bill that became the Protection of Children Act 1978. Eventually, she was joined by progressives in her condemnation of child sexual abuse.
But her contribution was erased, and the shameful history of the liberal tolerance for paedophilia in the decades following the sexual revolution was mostly forgotten.
Paedophilia is now condemned by liberals, and if the case for paedophilia presented by sexual revolutionaries such as Foucault is remembered at all, it is as a brief and embarrassing detour from the progressive path — a kink (so to speak) in the arc of the moral universe’s bend towards justice.
For liberals, the wall between licit and illicit sexual behaviour is now built upon an emphasis on consent. According to this argument, what makes paedophilia different is that children can’t consent, therefore any sexual activity involving them will always be unacceptable.
So far, so good. But on closer scrutiny, the consent argument falls apart. Liberals may be able to accept the banning of child porn without any qualms, since it necessitates the abuse of real children in its production. But what about images that the police term ‘pseudo-photographs’ which appear to depict real children?
What about illustrations? What about adults dressing up and pretending to be children during sex? What about porn performers who appear to be very young? What about porn performers who deliberately make themselves look even younger?
What about the 21-year-old social media star who sells pornographic images of herself wearing braces and girl’s clothes and in 2021 was criticised for sharing images of herself seemingly dressed as a child and pretending to be raped by a man dressed as a kidnapper?
The problem has always been where you draw the line, and this puts liberals in an awkward position. When you set out to break down sexual taboos, you shouldn’t be surprised when all taboos are considered fair game for breaking.
Including the ones you’d rather retain, such as consensual incest, cannibalism, sex with animals, sex with dead bodies, and sex acts that are at the very least paedophilic-adjacent, if not outright paedophilic.
The principles of sexual liberalism do, I’m sorry to say, trundle inexorably towards this end-point, whether or not we want them to.
Indeed, I fear we are now starting to see some slippage back towards the paedophilia advocacy of the 1970s, in media like Netflix's Cuties
Indeed, I fear we are now starting to see some slippage back towards the paedophilia advocacy of the 1970s. In 2020, Netflix released a film called Cuties in which the protagonist is 11-year-old Amy. Living in a poor district of Paris, she finds herself in the orbit of a group of girls who call themselves the Cuties.
They are not nice girls. They bully Amy and each other, they physically attack other children, they steal, they lie, and they also twerk, gyrating in skimpy outfits, bumping, grinding and pouting. They jiggle their tiny backsides and hump the floor in an imitation of pornified ecstasy.
Netflix defended the film by pointing out that it was intended as a commentary on the harms of child sexualisation. The problem was that it also featured a lot of actual child sexualisation, and the original marketing for the film played on this theme, with the four very young actresses dressed in glorified bikinis and arranged in suggestive poses.
Gritty depictions of child sexualisation are not entirely new. Taxi Driver (1976), Pretty Baby (1978) and Thirteen (2003) all portrayed pre-pubescent girls in sexually inappropriate scenarios. But Cuties went farther than any of these films in not only suggesting sexualisation but actually showing it, and at length.
Nevertheless, Cuties received positive reviews in outlets such as the Washington Post, Rolling Stone and the New Yorker. Here, one newspaper critic praised this act of provocation in ‘an age terrified of child sexuality’ and later tweeted his delight that the film had ‘p***ed off all the right people’. The word ‘hysterical’ recurred in these reviews, alongside the suggestion that the outrage over Cuties was wholly disproportionate, derived solely from a conservative moral panic over paedophilia.
There is something about paedophilia anxiety that is currently considered rather low-status among the liberal elites. Snobbish progressives present it as an obsession of the ignorant and credulous working classes, fired up by tabloid newspaper stories.
They cite the case of the trainee paediatrician in Gwent who came home to find the word ‘Paedo’ painted on her front door by teenagers who had confused the word ‘paediatrician’ with ‘paedophile’.
We should all be alert to such wrong and frenzied overreactions. But equally we should not forget that there have been shocking examples of child sexual abuse taking place, at scale and without detection.
Jimmy Savile abusing up to a thousand children on BBC premises would sound like a conspiracy theory if we didn’t know it to be true, just as Jeffrey Epstein supplying underage girls to famous and powerful men sounds like bizarre fiction.
Yet these things really happened. They are an indication of the murky places to which a no-holds-barred attitude to sexual liberation can lead — just as Mrs Whitehouse was warning all those years ago, and got no thanks for.
On this week’s edition of BBC Radio’s Moral Maze , my colleagues and I discussed the role of the university.
For years, there’s been concern about so-called “Mickey Mouse” degrees that do nothing to boost job prospects. Eight British universities are currently under investigation for providing poor quality degrees. The proportion of first-class degrees has increased so much that at this rate it’s been estimated that by 2061 all undergraduates will gain a first.
The expansion of the universities in the nineties was aimed to increase social mobility. But have university standards been sacrificed to social engineering? Are so many young people really suited to the disciplines of academia, or would they be better served by vocational training courses? Have declining standards substituted propaganda for knowledge, replacing “how to think” by “what to think”? And with the principal aim no longer the training of the mind, is this why the universities have ceased to be the guardians of ideas and free expression and have become instead engines of coerced conformity and suppression of dissent?
My co-panellists were Ella Whelan, Matthew Taylor and Mona Siddiqui. Our witnesses were Rachel Hewitt, chief executive at Million Plus, the “association for modern universities”; Harry Lambert, senior politics correspondent at the New Statesman; Edith Hall, professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Durham; and Dennis Hayes, professor of education at the University of Derby.
who say to images, ‘You are our gods,’ will be turned back in utter shame.
Blogger: those ungodly people who worship idols and false gods would seem to be those who commit the most heinous of sins against the Lord Our God who makes it very clear, throughout the entire Old Testament, that the consequences of such behaviour will be terrible.
The ungodly today criticise The Lord for his actions against idolatry without any sense how dreadful this sin/crime really is. (Let us not forget the horrendous human sacrifices - principally of children - which were common amongst so many of the tribes.)
As creator, our God is entitled to declare anything a sin. He is entitled to impose any consequences.
Our problem in a modern age is that although few worship idols directly, many worship both false gods and particular brands of materialism as a form of latter day idolatry.
Another rough start to the week for TalkTV. The latest BARB figures show GB News thrashed them in every prime time slot last night, with Farage miles ahead at 99,000 viewers. Piers Morgan Unwatched came in fifth with 42,500. Maybe his upcoming six-week break in the summer will be a chance to recharge the batteries…
English Votes for English Laws addresses the so-called 'West Lothian Question' - the position where English MPs cannot vote on matters which have been devolved to other parts of the UK, but Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland MPs can vote on those same matters when the UK Parliament is legislating solely for England.
A new study suggests moderate coffee intake daily can lower the risk of early death.Getty Images
A cup a day keeps the doctor away?
Mounting evidence shows caffeine lovers who drink coffee daily are less likely to die early compared to those who don’t, a new study suggests.
For seven years, Southern Medical University researchers in Guangzhou, China studied the habits and overall health of over 171,000 people, who did not have cancer or health disease, in the UK.
Ultimately, they discovered that those who drank unsweetened coffee regularly were 15 to 21% less likely to die than the participants who didn’t. The study also found that people who drank between one and four cups of lightly sweetened coffee every day were 29 to 31% less likely to die.
The study was published Tuesday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.
By Jonathan Clark, Premier Lifeline22 April 20222 min read
Jonathan Clark is the Director of Premier Lifeline
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