O worship the King, all-glorious above,
O gratefully sing His power and His love;
Our Shield and Defender, the Ancient of Days,
Pavilioned in splendor, and girded with praise.
O tell of His might, O sing of His grace,
Whose robe is the light, whose canopy space;
His chariots of wrath the deep thunderclouds form,
And dark is His path on the wings of the storm.
Thy bountiful care what tongue can recite?
It breathes in the air, it shines in the light;
It streams from the hills, it descends to the plain,
And sweetly distills in the dew and the rain.
Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail,
In Thee do we trust, nor find Thee to fail;
Thy mercies how tender, how firm to the end,
Our Maker, Defender, Redeemer, and Friend!
Public domain hymn text (published 1833). Words by Robert Grant.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Robert Grant was a British politician and colonial administrator, born in India in 1779 to a family with long-standing professional ties to the East India Company, the powerful chartered trading company that effectively governed large portions of British India during this period before direct crown rule was established. He served for many years afterward as a Member of Parliament in London, representing several different constituencies over the course of a lengthy political career, before eventually returning to the land of his birth as Governor of Bombay, a senior and demanding colonial administrative post he held continuously until his death in office in 1838.
He wrote this hymn as a fairly close paraphrase of Psalm 104, a psalm that praises God's majesty specifically as it is revealed and displayed through the observable created natural world — towering mountains, drifting clouds, rushing wind, and streaming light — a theme that would very plausibly have resonated with particular personal force for a man whose own varied career took him across such vast geographic distances and through such dramatically different physical landscapes over the course of his lifetime, from the crowded debating chambers of Parliament in London to the mountains, coastline, and monsoon climate of colonial western India.
Grant's hymn writing occupied only a relatively minor, almost incidental portion of a working life and public career spent primarily in law, national politics, and eventually senior colonial administration — fields in which he achieved genuine, substantial professional distinction during his own lifetime, including a knighthood and considerable political influence within the East India Company's governing structure.
Yet this single hymn has, in a striking reversal of relative importance, ultimately outlasted virtually every other specific aspect of his once-prominent public career, remaining in continuous, active congregational use in English-speaking churches around the world for nearly two full centuries after his death in Bombay, at a point in history when most other specific details of his parliamentary votes, colonial policy decisions, and administrative record have long since faded from all but the most specialized historical memory.
