All hail the power of Jesus' name!
Let angels prostrate fall;
Bring forth the royal diadem,
And crown Him Lord of all.
Let every kindred, every tribe,
On this terrestrial ball,
To Him all majesty ascribe,
And crown Him Lord of all.
O that with yonder sacred throng
We at His feet may fall!
We'll join the everlasting song,
And crown Him Lord of all.
Public domain hymn text (published 1779). Words by Edward Perronet.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Edward Perronet was the son of a Swiss-English clergyman and became a close personal associate of both John and Charles Wesley during the formative early years of the Methodist revival in England, traveling and preaching alongside the Wesley brothers for a period and contributing actively to the movement's rapid early growth. His relationship with the Wesleys eventually soured, however, over disagreements about church authority and the movement's proper relationship to the established Church of England, leading to a falling-out that pushed Perronet toward more independent, nonconformist religious circles for the remainder of his ministry.
This hymn belongs to a distinct and historically significant genre sometimes called the 'coronation' hymns of Christ — hymns built entirely around the image of Christ being formally crowned and universally acknowledged as sovereign ruler by the whole of creation, human and angelic alike. Its imagery draws directly on passages such as Revelation 19, which pictures Christ returning as a conquering king wearing many crowns, and Philippians 2, which describes a future moment when every knee in heaven, on earth, and under the earth will bow and every tongue confess Jesus Christ as Lord.
The hymn was originally published anonymously in a religious magazine in 1780, and for a number of years afterward its true authorship remained genuinely uncertain or actively disputed among hymnologists, with several other names circulating as possible writers before it was eventually and firmly attributed to Perronet based on later documentary evidence.
Multiple different tunes have been paired with the text over the more than two centuries since its writing, reflecting shifting musical tastes across different eras and denominations, but by far the most famous and enduring pairing is the tune known as 'Coronation,' composed by the American self-taught composer Oliver Holden in 1793. Holden, a carpenter and shipwright by trade who took up hymn composition as a sideline, gave the hymn a particularly grand, march-like, triumphant character in its most familiar American setting — a musical treatment widely credited with cementing the hymn's lasting popularity across the United States long after the specific eighteenth-century English Methodist controversies that had originally shaped its author's career had faded from memory.
