Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
And with fear and trembling stand;
Ponder nothing earthly-minded,
For with blessing in His hand,
Christ our God to earth descendeth,
Our full homage to demand.
King of kings, yet born of Mary,
As of old on earth He stood,
Lord of lords, in human vesture,
In the body and the blood;
He will give to all the faithful
His own self for heavenly food.
Rank on rank the host of heaven
Spreads its vanguard on the way,
As the Light of light descendeth
From the realms of endless day,
That the powers of hell may vanish
As the darkness clears away.
Public domain hymn text (1864 (English translation)). Words by Gerard Moultrie, from the ancient Liturgy of St. James.
The Story Behind the Hymn
This hymn's text is adapted from a section of the ancient Liturgy of St. James, one of the oldest surviving complete texts for Christian worship still used today, associated in its origins with the church of Jerusalem and dating in some form to at least the fourth century, though its precise original composition history remains genuinely uncertain given how many centuries of gradual liturgical development lie behind its final form.
The specific portion of the liturgy this hymn draws on is the Cherubic Hymn, sung at the moment in the ancient Eastern liturgy when the bread and wine for Communion are formally carried in solemn procession to the altar, and its opening command for 'all mortal flesh' to 'keep silence' reflects the sense of profound, almost overwhelming reverence traditionally associated with that specific liturgical moment in Eastern Christian worship.
Gerard Moultrie, an English clergyman, translated and adapted the ancient Greek liturgical text into the English hymn version commonly sung today in 1864, part of the same broader nineteenth-century English movement — including figures like John Mason Neale, discussed extensively elsewhere in this collection — dedicated to recovering ancient Eastern and Western liturgical texts for English-speaking congregations.
The hymn is set to 'Picardy,' a traditional French folk carol melody with its own separate and much older history entirely unconnected to the ancient Greek liturgical text, adapted for congregational use considerably after Moultrie's own English translation — meaning the hymn as commonly sung today brings together an ancient Middle Eastern liturgical text, an English nineteenth-century translation, and a French folk melody, three entirely separate historical and geographic threads combined into a single hymn now sung specifically at Communion services across a wide range of English-speaking denominations.
