Sovereign of worlds! display Thy power

Sovereign of worlds! display Thy power. Bourne Hall Draper* (1775-1843). Samuel Willoughby Duffield has described the origins of this hymn. It was from a poem in seven stanzas beginning ‘Ruler of worlds, display Thy power’. This hymn consisted of lines 1-12 and 17-20 of the original poem, slightly altered. The remainder of the poem, lines 13-16 and 21-28, was used for the best known hymn by Draper, ‘Ye Christian heralds, go, proclaim’*. Duffield dates its first appearance in a hymnal as being in Hymns, Original and Selected, for the Use of Christians, edited by Elias Smith and Abner Jones* (Portland, Maine, 1805), but he does not say if this was the original poem or the poem ‘cut in twain’...