Lyrics
Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son;
Endless is the victory Thou o'er death hast won.
Angels in bright raiment rolled the stone away,
Kept the folded grave-clothes where Thy body lay.
Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son;
Endless is the victory Thou o'er death hast won.
Lo, Jesus meets us, risen from the tomb;
Lovingly He greets us, scatters fear and gloom.
Let His church with gladness hymns of triumph sing,
For the Lord now liveth; death hath lost its sting.
No more we doubt Thee, glorious Prince of life!
Life is naught without Thee; aid us in our strife;
Make us more than conquerors, through Thy deathless love;
Bring us safe through Jordan to Thy home above.
Public domain hymn text and tune (text 1884; English translation 1925 by Richard Birch Hoyle). Words by Edmond Budry; tune adapted from Handel's oratorio Judas Maccabaeus.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Edmond Louis Budry, a Swiss pastor serving churches near Lausanne, wrote "A Toi la Gloire" — "Thine Be the Glory" — in 1884, reportedly not long after the death of his first wife, Marie de Vayenborg. The French text was first published the following year in Chants Évangéliques, a Lausanne hymn collection, and Budry went on to serve as minister of the Free Church in Vevey, his hometown, for thirty-five years.
Rather than writing a new melody, Budry set his words to an existing piece of music already associated with triumph: the chorus "See, the Conqu'ring Hero Comes" from George Frideric Handel's oratorio Judas Maccabaeus, composed more than a century earlier to celebrate the Maccabean military victories described in the Apocrypha. Applied to the resurrection instead of an ancient battlefield, Handel's stately, celebratory tune found an entirely new life.
The hymn remained largely confined to French-speaking congregations for four decades until 1925, when Richard Birch Hoyle translated it into the English version now sung widely, publishing it in the Cantate Domino hymnal of the World Student Christian Federation — an appropriately international home for a hymn that had already crossed from a private grief in French-speaking Switzerland to an English-language Easter standard.
Written, by most accounts, out of personal loss, "Thine Is the Glory" nonetheless became one of the most exultant Easter hymns in wide use, its Handel-borrowed fanfare carrying congregations from the empty tomb of the first verse to the promise, in the last, of being brought safely home.
