Ere God had built the mountains

Ere God had built the mountains. William Cowper* (1731-1800). First printed in Olney Hymns (1779), Book I (‘On select Texts of Scripture’) Hymn LII, entitled ‘Wisdom’. In Britain this very poetic hymn seems to have been initially neglected by hymn compilers, and it is still little known beyond the Methodist Church. It was included in the 1876 Wesleyan A Collection of Hymns (‘Wesley’s Hymns’) and subsequently in the Wesleyan Methodist Hymn Book (1904) and MHB (1933). In HP it is helpfully printed with quotation marks round Wisdom’s words, which form the first two stanzas, although there were no quotation marks in Olney Hymns: Ere God had built the mountains,Or rais’d the fruitful...