"Praise, O ye servants of the Lord, praise the Name of the Lord." Psalm 113:1
Words: James Montgomery, 1789:
Holland, in his Memoirs of Montgomery, says that after Montgomery ran away from the Moravian school at Fulneck, he lived from 1788 to June 19, 1789, with one Lockwood, at Mirfield, near Leeds. This person was a Moravian. He kept a small retail shop, and went by the name of the "Fine Bread Baker." Holland says:-
"Of the conduct of Montgomery behind the counter we never heard much; he did not remain there more than a year and a half; he had little to do, and still less inclination for the employment, such as it was. While there he composed the largest part of the poem of Alfred, and amongst his smaller pieces a metrical version of the 113th Psalm, which, many years afterwards, was published, with some verbal alterations, in the collection [Cotterill's Sel., 1819] now in use under the auspices of the Archbishop of York in various churches in the diocese and elsewhere."-Memoirs, i. p. 73
This version of
Ps. 113 is on p. 57 of Cotterill's Sel., 1819, in 5 st. of 4 l. It was republished in Montgomery's Songs of Zion, 1822, and is found in several modern hymnbooks. It very frequently begins, "Servants of God! in joyful lays." This is the first line of the last stanza, and is substituted for the original opening of the hymn. This is the earliest of Montgomery's hymns to which a date can be given.John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology
Music: "Truro," Williams' Psalmodia Evangelica, 1789
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