Send down thy truth, O God

Send down thy truth, O God. Edward Rowland Sill* (1841-1887).  This is said (JJ, p. 1703, and others) to have been in Sill’s The Hermitage, but it is not in the edition published by Leypoldt & Holt in New York in 1868, although truth is a recurring theme in Sill’s work (a poem in The Hermitage, entitled ‘A Prayer’, begins ‘O God, our Father, if we had but truth!’). The present hymn was written when Sill was briefly a student at the Harvard Divinity School in 1867. Its composition is described by William Belmont Parker: Among the fruits of the months which he spent at the Divinity School was the hymn, “Send down thy truth, O Lord,” written for a fellow-student’s ordination and now a...