Fixing Another Hymn

Many years ago, I complained about the hymn “Earth and All Stars.” I offered some alternative satirical lyrics. Eventually, I wrote an entirely new text for the popular tune. My text is quirky, though nonetheless serious. Today, I turn my attention to a perfectly fine, though perhaps not perfect, hymn.

“The Church’s One Foundation” is a popular Protestant hymn set to the tune Aurelia by Samuel Sebastian Wesley. It appears in The Hymnal 1982 of the Episcopal Church as hymn #525. Its third verse in the hymnal is the following:

Mid toil and tribulation,
And tumult of her war,
She waits the consummation
Of peace forever more;
Till with the vision glorious,
Her longing eyes are blest,
And the great Church victorious
Shall be the Church at rest.

(The punctuation above differs slightly from that of the hymnal.)

The marriage of text and tune is generally felicitous. I have always been uncomfortable with the third verse, however. The problem is with the penultimate line. The word “the” falls on the first beat of a measure. Both musically and poetically—every line begins with an iamb, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one—“the” should be stressed, but this stress makes no sense.

The offending line is, I think, easily fixed. In place of “And the great Church victorious,” we could substitute “And God’s great Church victorious.” One might quibble with this, I suppose. Whose church is it anyway? Usually Jesus Christ is seen as the head of the church, so a better fix might be “And Christ’s great Church victorious.” I’ll skip arguments about the Trinity here.