Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.
Public domain hymn text (published 1674). Words by Thomas Ken.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Thomas Ken was an English bishop widely remembered for his personal courage and unwavering integrity in the face of direct political pressure — he was briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1688 alongside six fellow bishops for formally refusing to read aloud, from the pulpit, a royal declaration issued by King James II that Ken and his colleagues believed violated the conscience and doctrinal integrity of the Church of England. He and the other imprisoned bishops were eventually tried and acquitted amid enormous public sympathy, but Ken's principled stubbornness did not end there.
Only months later, following the overthrow of James II in what became known as the Glorious Revolution, Ken again refused, this time on the opposite side of the political question, to swear an oath of allegiance to the new monarch, William III, believing the deposed King James remained the rightful sovereign despite Ken's own earlier conflict with him — a position that cost Ken his bishopric entirely and left him without income or official standing for the last two decades of his life, a price he apparently considered worth paying for consistency of conscience.
Decades earlier in his career, while serving as a chaplain at Winchester College, Ken had written a small set of daily devotional hymns specifically for the students there to use in private prayer — one intended for morning use, one for evening — each of the two hymns ending with the identical closing stanza of praise addressed to the Trinity. That final four-line stanza, beginning 'praise God from whom all blessings flow,' eventually broke completely free of the longer morning and evening hymns it had originally been written to conclude, and gradually began to be sung entirely on its own, as a short, self-contained doxology usable in almost any worship context.
In that detached, freestanding four-line form, it has gone on to become one of the single most frequently sung passages in the entire history of Christian worship, used for centuries as a standard closing hymn or offertory response in churches across an extraordinarily wide range of denominations — Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and many others — the overwhelming majority of whose members have very likely never heard the name Thomas Ken, let alone the story of his imprisonment in the Tower of London for refusing to compromise his conscience.
