Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,
And lighten with celestial fire;
Thou the anointing Spirit art,
Who dost Thy sevenfold gifts impart.
Thy blessed unction from above
Is comfort, life, and fire of love;
Enable with perpetual light
The dullness of our blinded sight.
Public domain hymn text (1627 (English translation)). Words by John Cosin, after an anonymous or Rabanus Maurus original.
The Story Behind the Hymn
This hymn's underlying Latin text, 'Veni Creator Spiritus,' is traditionally attributed to Rabanus Maurus, a ninth-century Benedictine monk and later archbishop of Mainz in what is now Germany, though as with several other ancient hymn texts in this collection, modern scholars regard this specific attribution as uncertain rather than firmly established, and the hymn may in fact predate Rabanus Maurus's own lifetime.
The original Latin hymn became, over the following centuries, one of the most important and widely used pieces of liturgical text in the entire Western Christian tradition, sung for many centuries specifically at the ordination of new priests and bishops within the Roman Catholic Church, at the coronation of English monarchs going back many centuries, and at the opening of church councils, making it one of the most consistently and ceremonially significant hymns in all of Christian history well before any English translation of it existed.
John Cosin, an English bishop who was later forced into temporary exile in France during the Puritan Commonwealth period following the English Civil War, translated the Latin text into the English version most commonly used today in 1627, some years before his later exile, as part of his broader work compiling a collection of devotions for private use.
The hymn's reference to the Holy Spirit's 'sevenfold gifts' draws on a traditional Christian enumeration of specific spiritual gifts derived from Isaiah 11:2-3 — wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord — a theological framework that had already been well established for centuries in Christian teaching by the time this hymn was first composed, giving the hymn's compact reference to 'sevenfold gifts' a considerably deeper and more specific theological background than its brief mention within the hymn's own text alone might suggest to modern readers unfamiliar with that older tradition.
