O Lord of life and truth and grace

O Lord of life and truth and grace. Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham* (1793-1870).  This was written for the inauguration of Henry Whitney Bellows (1814-1882) to the pastorate of the First Congregational Church in New York City in 1839 (the church was later The Unitarian Church of All Souls). Frothingham would have known Bellows when they were Boston Unitarians. Most texts of the hymn are in four stanzas, as in The Disciples’ Hymn Book (Boston, 1844) of the Church of the Disciples, where it was headed ‘The Church’:  O Lord of life, and truth, and grace,  Ere nature was begun, Make welcome to our erring race  Thy Spirit and thy Son.  We hail the church, built high o’er all  The heathens’...