Glorious things of thee are spoken,
Zion, city of our God;
He whose word cannot be broken
Formed thee for His own abode;
On the Rock of Ages founded,
What can shake thy sure repose?
With salvation’s walls surrounded,
Thou mayst smile at all thy foes.
See, the streams of living waters,
Springing from eternal love,
Well supply thy sons and daughters,
And all fear of want remove;
Who can faint while such a river
Ever flows their thirst to assuage?
Grace, which like the Lord, the giver,
Never fails from age to age.
Round each habitation hovering,
See the cloud and fire appear
For a glory and a covering,
Showing that the Lord is near:
Thus deriving from their banner
Light by night and shade by day,
Safe they feed upon the manna
Which He gives them when they pray.
Note: the later verse(s) below have been reconstructed from historical memory and may not be word-for-word identical to the original published text.
Public domain hymn text (1779). Words by John Newton.
The Story Behind the Hymn
John Newton, already discussed elsewhere in this collection as the former slave-ship captain and author of 'Amazing Grace' (hymn 1), wrote this hymn's text for the same 1779 'Olney Hymns' collection he compiled jointly with the poet William Cowper (author of hymn 42, 'There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood'), basing its central image on Psalm 87, a psalm celebrating the city of Zion, meaning Jerusalem, as God's own specially chosen dwelling place among His people.
Newton's hymn deliberately extends that ancient image of the earthly city of Jerusalem into a broader meditation on the Christian Church itself as a spiritual 'Zion,' secure and unshakeable specifically because it is founded, in the hymn's own words, on 'the Rock of Ages' rather than on any merely human institution or earthly power — a particularly meaningful claim of security for Newton personally, given his own dramatic personal history of instability and moral catastrophe before his conversion.
The hymn's imagery of 'streams of living waters' drawing on both Psalm 46:4 and John 7:38, where Jesus speaks of 'rivers of living water' flowing from within believers, reinforces the same overall theme of secure, unfailing divine provision running throughout the hymn — a river that, unlike Newton's own earlier turbulent life at sea, never runs dry or turns dangerous.
Franz Joseph Haydn, the celebrated Austrian classical composer, composed the tune most commonly used with the hymn today, adapting a melody originally written for a completely different secular purpose, and the hymn's confident, settled tone of secure belonging has made it a favored choice for church anniversary and dedication services, sung by congregations celebrating their own specific church building's continuity in terms directly borrowed from Newton's larger meditation on the Church's permanent, unshakeable spiritual foundation.
