O Brothers, Lift Your Voices

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O brothers, lift your voices

Author: Edward Henry Bickersteth (1848)
Published in 68 hymnals

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	If I Be Lifted Up (Organ Settings Of Hym…

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Representative Text

1 O brothers, lift your voices,
Triumphant songs to raise;
Till heaven on high rejoices,
And earth is filled with praise.
Ten thousand hearts are bounding
With holy hopes and free;
The Gospel trump is sounding,
The trump of Jubilee.

2 O Christian brothers, glorious
Shall be the conflict's close:
The cross hath been victorious,
And shall be o'er its foes.
Faith is our battle-token;
Our Leader all controls;
Our trophies, fetters broken;
Our captives, ransomed souls.

3 Not unto us; Lord Jesus,
To Thee all praise be due!
Whose blood-bought mercy frees us,
Has freed our brethren too.
Not unto us: in glory
The angels catch the strain,
And cast their crowns before Thee
Exultingly again.

4 Captain of our salvation,
Thy presence we adore:
Praise, glory, adoration
Be Thine for evermore!
Still on in conflict pressing,
On Thee Thy people call,
Thee, King of kings confessing,
Thee, crowning Lord of all.

The Hymnal: revised and enlarged as adopted by the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America in the year of our Lord 1892

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Author: Edward Henry Bickersteth

Bickersteth, Edward Henry, D.D., son of Edward Bickersteth, Sr. born at Islington, Jan. 1825, and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge (B.A. with honours, 1847; M.A., 1850). On taking Holy Orders in 1848, he became curate of Banningham, Norfolk, and then of Christ Church, Tunbridge Wells. His preferment to the Rectory of Hinton-Martell, in 1852, was followed by that of the Vicarage of Christ Church, Hampstead, 1855. In 1885 he became Dean of Gloucester, and the same year Bishop of Exeter. Bishop Bickersteth's works, chiefly poetical, are:— (l) Poems, 1849; (2) Water from the Well-spring, 1852; (3) The Rock of Ages, 1858 ; (4) Commentary on the New Testament, 1864; (5) Yesterday, To-day, and For Ever, 1867; (6) The Spirit of Life, 1868;… Go to person page >

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First Line:	O brothers, lift your voices
Title:	O Brothers, Lift Your Voices
Author:	Edward Henry Bickersteth (1848)
Meter:	7.6.7.6 D
Language:	English
Copyright:	Public Domain

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Notes

O brothers, lift [tune] your voices. Bishop E. H. Bickersteth. [Missions.] Written for the Jubilee of the Church Missionary Society, 1848, and first printed in the Jubilee Tract of that year. It was given in the author's Poems, 1849; his Psalms & Hymns, 1858; and his Hymnal Companion, 1870 and 1876. In Kennedy, 1863, it reads, "O brothers, tune your voices," but the hymn is not improved by the change.

--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)

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Tune

BRADFORD (Haydn)

LANCASHIRE (Smart)

Henry T. Smart (PHH 233) composed the tune in 1835 for use at a missions festival at Blackburn, Lancashire, England. For that festival, which celebrated the three-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation in England, the tune was set to Reginald Heber's (PHH 249) “From Greenland's Icy Mountains.”…

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[O brothers, lift your voices] (Storer)

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