Our Father, while our hearts unlearn

Our Father, while our hearts unlearn. Oliver Wendell Holmes* (1809-1894).   This hymn is six stanzas was entitled ‘Hymn written for the twenty-fifth Anniversary Reorganization of the Boston Young Men’s Christian Union, May 31, 1893’, and published in Holmes’s Complete Poetical Works (Boston and New York, 1890). In Britain it was included by William Garrett Horder* in Worship-Song (1905), and it was chosen by the undogmatic Percy Dearmer* for SofP and SofPE. Dearmer described it (Songs of Praise Discussed, 1933, p. 328) as ‘this most felicitously expressed and Christian hymn’. It was included in the Unitarian Hymns of Worship (1927) and Hymns of Worship Revised (1962). It is found more...