We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known;
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing;
Sing praises to His name, He forgets not His own.
Beside us to guide us, our God with us joining,
Ordaining, maintaining His kingdom divine;
So from the beginning the fight we were winning;
Thou, Lord, wast at our side, all glory be Thine!
Public domain hymn text (1894 (English translation)). Words by Theodore Baker, from Adrianus Valerius.
The Story Behind the Hymn
This hymn's original Dutch text, 'Wilt heden nu treden,' was written by Adrianus Valerius, a Dutch poet and amateur historian, and published in 1626 as part of a larger collection of songs commemorating the Dutch struggle for independence from Spanish Habsburg rule, a prolonged conflict known as the Eighty Years' War that had only recently seen a temporary truce by the time Valerius compiled his collection.
The hymn's original context was specifically national and political as much as devotional, understood by its first Dutch singers as a song of thanksgiving for military and political deliverance from a hostile foreign power — the 'wicked oppressing' of its English translation referred, in its original setting, quite specifically to Spanish forces rather than functioning as a purely abstract or generalized reference to sin or evil.
Theodore Baker, an American musicologist who spent years studying and translating European folk and hymn traditions, translated the Dutch text into the English version commonly sung today in 1894, more than two and a half centuries after Valerius originally wrote it, adapting a text about a specific seventeenth-century national struggle for continued use as a more general hymn of thanksgiving suitable for any English-speaking congregation regardless of their own national history.
The hymn became especially and specifically associated in America with the Thanksgiving holiday, sung in United States churches every November with little awareness among most congregations of its original, considerably more specific origins as a Dutch patriotic song of relief and gratitude for survival of a decades-long war against a much larger imperial power.
