Children of the heavenly King. J. Cennick. [Encouragement to Praise.] This is the most popular of this author's hymns, and, in an abbreviated form, it is found in a large proportion of the hymnals published in the English language for more than 100 years. It appeared in his Sacred Hymns for the Children of God, &c, 1742, Pt. iii., in 12 stanzas of 4 lines. In 1753, G. Whitefield gave 6 stanzas in his Collection as No. 38 of Pt. ii. M. Madan repeated this in 1760, and thus the abbreviated form came into use. Departures from Whitefield's arrangement are found in several instances, but as the full text has been included by Dr. Rogers in Lyra Britannica, 1867, p. 666, and can be easily consulted, they are not tabulated. Whitefield's text consisted of stanzas i., ii., iv., v., vii. and viii. In Bingham's Hymnologia Christiana Latina, 1871, p. 123, there is a Latin rendering of the text as given in Bickersteth's Christian Psalmody, 1833, "Filii Regis superni, cantatis."
--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)