O Word of God above

O Word of God above. Isaac Williams* (1802-1865). First published in the publication that was sympathetic to Tractarian views and to the Oxford Movement*, the British Magazine, in July 1837. It was then included in Williams’s  Hymns translated from the Parisian Breviary (1839). It was a translation of a hymn by a Jesuit, Charles Guiet (1601-1664), beginning ‘Patris aeterni soboles coaeva’ (‘Issue of the eternal Father’) published in a Paris Breviary of 1680 and in later editions. In 1839 Williams included it in a section ‘On the Consecration of a Church’, to be sung ‘At the Mattins’. A version of Williams’s translation was included by the compilers of the First Edition of A&M (1861),...