Bread of heaven! on thee we feed

Bread of heaven! on thee we feed. Josiah Conder* (1789-1855). First published in Conder’s The Star in the East; with Other Poems (1824), entitled ‘For the Eucharist’, with quotations from John 6: 51-4 and John 15: 1 (‘I am the true vine…’). It was included in The Congregational Hymn Book (1836), edited by Conder. The original text used the first person — ‘Bread of heaven, on thee I feed’ — but it was changed to ‘we’ in Josiah Pratt’s Psalms and Hymns (1829), which printed it in three 4-line stanzas rather than two 6-line ones. William Cooke* and William Denton*, in the Church Hymnal (1853), used the two-stanza form, with further alterations which were taken over by the First Edition of...