This is the greatest hymn, I think. I heard it on the radio recently, and it took me back to the days of stone and certainty. Big, breathtaking music like this has opened many people's unsustainable path to eternity.
Dear Lord and Father of Mankind is a sledgehammer, but it's a sledgehammer with nuance.
It has both WORDS and MUSIC. The words are taken from a longer poem called The Brewing of Soma (ooh tasty!) by the American Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier.
And the happy accident that is the music that these words are commonly set to is a tune called Repton by Hubert Parry. A particular part of that happy accident is that Parry's tune needed the last line of Whittier's verse to be repeated. Hell yeah!
Hubert Parry also wrote the tune to Jerusalem. Wall to wall bangers! - I've always kind of hated Jerusalem because of its association with English patriotism, and I particularly hated the merging of patriotism with faith, so for me its undoubted grandeur really unsettled me. I had fewer misgivings about the grandeur of Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, though perhaps, on some occasions, I found its heady beauty a little frightening.
The sound of Dear Lord and Father of Mankind being sung lustily (the only possible adverb) by 100+ young men of varying ability but shared commitment is one of the sounds, and I mean this quite honestly and fondly, that will stay with me forever.
A lot of hymns are quite bad - the tunes are mundane and so are the words. There are a decent handful which are good, but I'm not sure there are others that take you so many places so quickly as Dear Lord and Father ... that build the emotions, then slow them down, then again, then in a different way, that really make use of pitch and volume quite so undeniably.
Anyway, there's more I could say, but I just thought of this well-known meme while I was writing and it sums it up pretty perfectly, so here it is ...
Quite pleased with that ...
