Come, Thou Almighty King,
Help us Thy name to sing,
Help us to praise!
Father, all glorious,
O’er all victorious,
Come, and reign over us,
Ancient of Days!
Come, Thou Incarnate Word,
Gird on Thy mighty sword,
Our prayer attend!
Come, and Thy people bless,
And give Thy Word success;
Spirit of holiness,
On us descend!
To Thee, great One in Three,
Eternal praises be,
Hence, evermore!
Thy sovereign majesty
May we in glory see,
And to eternity
Love and adore!
Public domain hymn text (c. 1757). Words by Anonymous.
The Story Behind the Hymn
The hymn's original author remains entirely unknown to this day; it first appeared anonymously in a printed English pamphlet sometime around 1757, published alongside a number of separate hymns actually written by Charles Wesley, a physical proximity in print that subsequently led to a long-standing but almost certainly mistaken popular tradition of attributing this particular hymn directly to Wesley himself, despite the complete absence of any solid supporting documentary evidence for that specific attribution. Modern hymnologists who have studied the question in detail generally consider the text's true original author to be permanently unrecoverable at this historical distance, the pamphlet's original publisher having left no further identifying information behind.
The tune most closely and consistently associated with the text today, generally known either as 'Italian Hymn' or alternatively as 'Trinity,' was composed considerably later by Felice de Giardini, an accomplished Italian violinist and composer who spent a substantial portion of his own working career based in London, completing the tune in 1769 — more than a full decade after the hymn's own words had already been circulating anonymously in printed form among English congregations.
The hymn's own deliberate three-part structure — addressing in careful sequence first the Father, then the Son, and finally the Holy Spirit individually, before joining all three together in a single unified closing stanza of collective Trinitarian praise — reportedly served for a period during the eighteenth century as something close to an unofficial patriotic alternative to the British national anthem 'God Save the King' in certain English settings, since the two pieces happened to share a strikingly similar opening rhythm and overall metrical structure, making them musically interchangeable in practice for congregations or audiences who wished to sing one tune with either set of words depending on the specific occasion.
