Lyrics
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!
We all do extol Thee, Thou leader triumphant,
And pray that Thou still our defender wilt be;
Let Thy congregation escape tribulation;
Thy name be ever praised! O Lord, make us free!
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.
It was 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. Its first Dutch singers understood it 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.
He adapted 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.
Most congregations have little awareness 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.
