Salvation! O the joyful sound

Salvation! O the joyful sound. Isaac Watts* (1674-1748) and Walter Shirley* (1725-1786). This began as ‘LXXXVIII. Salvation’ in Book II, ‘Compos’d on Divine Subjects’, of Isaac Watts’s Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707). It had three stanzas: Salvation! O the joyful Sound!   ’Tis Music to our Ears; A Sovereign Balm for every Wound,   A Cordial for our Fears. Bury’d in Sorrow and in Sin,   At Hell’s dark Door we lay, But we arise by Grace Divine   To see a heavenly Day. Salvation! let the Eccho fly   The spacious Earth around, While all the Armies of the Sky   Conspire to raise the Sound. Not surprisingly, perhaps, this was one of the hymns selected by William Booth* for Songs of the Salvation...