Reflections on “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,“ the Entrance Hymn (10:15) on November 8.
The marriage of the text “Come, thou fount…” with the tune Nettleton is an undoubted member of the “hit parade” of text-tune combinations in the history of American Christianity. It has appeared not only in Episcopal hymnals, but also in Methodist, Baptist, Roman Catholic, United Church of Christ, Presbyterian, Mennonite, and several non-denominational collections.
The words (with some deletions and re-arrangements to fit the original six verses into our three) are by Robert Robinson, an Englishman born into poverty and low social status who eventually became a Methodist (and still later a Baptist) preacher. (His inability to pay for an education squelched his mother’s dream of him becoming an Anglican priest.) He wrote this text in 1758, at the age of 23. Reading between the lines, one can see signs of a proverbial “misspent youth.”
Come, thou fount of every blessing,
tune my heart to sing thy grace!
Streams of mercy never ceasing,
call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! Oh, fix me on it,
mount of God’s unchanging love.
The poetic imagery is immediately arresting and powerful, acknowledging God as the source (“fount”) of all good things (“every blessing”), and the only one capable of adequately turning a human heart into a musical instrument (“tune my heart to sing thy grace!”). The notion that God himself alone can enable us to praise him adequately (“Teach me some melodious sonnet”) can be found scattered through Christian devotional literature, and it rooted firmly in the Psalms.
Here I find my greatest treasure;
hither, by thy help, I’ve come;
and I hope, by thy good pleasure,
safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger
wandering from the fold of God;
he, to rescue me from danger,
interposed his precious blood.
This second stanza evokes the image of the Christian life as a journey back to God—which is to say, back “home.” It is a journey that cannot be safely undertaken apart from divine grace (“by thy good pleasure”). And it is a path from which we are always tempted to stray in the directions of alluring distractions (“wandering from the fold of God”, and in the next verse, “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it”). The final two lines are evocative of the final collect from the Good Friday liturgy: “we pray you to set your passion, cross, and death between your judgment and our souls.”
Oh, to grace how great a debtor
daily I’m constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to thee:
prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love;
here’s my heart, oh, take and seal it,
seal it for thy courts above.
Compelling poetic irony gives this final verse its power. Normally, we would think of a “fetter” than “binds” us to be something reprehensible, but here such images are used to describe God’s goodness and grace. This beautifully capsulizes the paradox between human freedom and God’s persistent pursuit of every human soul with the energy of his love.
The tune, Nettleton, originates several decades later than the text, and in a faraway place—early nineteenth century (northeastern) America. It is exemplary of a whole genre of American folk tunes that date from that era, and continues to be attractive for its sturdiness and singability.
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