Father of everlasting grace (Wesley) - arr. for piano by Peter Duckworth скачать в хорошем качестве

Father of everlasting grace (Wesley) - arr. for piano by Peter Duckworth

This great Pentecost hymn of Charles Wesley deserves to be better known, and certainly to be as widely known as its more familiar companion, "O thou who camest from above". Its central theme is thankfulness to God the Father for his "unspeakable gift" (or as we might say, unutterably precious gift) of the Holy Spirit, making complete sense of 2 Corinthians 9.15: "Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift". In some of the recordings that exist, this hymn is performed in the key of B flat which, although congenial to a brass band accompaniment, is something of a stretch for modern congregations. Here I play it in A flat. Regrettably, contemporary Methodist hymn books expunge "Thee" and "thou" from the text in favour of the anodyne "You", producing some anomalies that depart from the sense of the original. They would do well to remember the words of John Wesley in his Preface to the 1779 "Col­lect­ion of Hymns for the Use of the Peo­ple Called Me­thod­ists" - "Ma­ny gen­tle­men have done my bro­ther and me (though with­out nam­ing us) the hon­our to reprint ma­ny of our hymns. Now they are per­fect­ly wel­come to do so, pro­vid­ed they print them just as they are. But I de­sire they would not at­tempt to mend them, for they are real­ly not able. None of them is able to mend ei­ther the sense or the verse. Therefore, I must beg of them these two fa­vours: ei­ther to let them stand just as they are, to take things for bet­ter or worse, or to add the true read­ing in the mar­gin, or at the bot­tom of the page, that we may no lon­ger be ac­count­a­ble ei­ther for the non­sense or for the dog­ger­el of oth­er men."