God’s word reveals to us what we are to know and believe about God. It seems, however, that we are to know less about the Holy Spirit than we are to know about the other two persons in the Godhead. Scripture tells us, we may trust, all we need to know about the Holy Spirit, but it spends less time on this person of the Trinity than it does on the other two. Because Scripture is less fulsome in its description of the Holy Spirit, we tend to think and speak as if the Spirit’s nature were vague. But just because Scripture spends less time describing the Holy Spirit doesn’t excuse our thinking fuzzily about it. Of course, here as everywhere, the best mode of investigation is to turn to what Scripture does say, and that is exactly what Margaret Clarkson did when she wrote this hymn. Careful to avoid contemporary trends of treating the Holy Spirit like some kind of barbiturate with vaguely defined effects, Clarkson saturates her hymn with the most concrete of scriptural descriptions of the Holy Spirit’s nature and work.

Because the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (and, perhaps, because the Bible includes no examples of prayer addressed particularly to the Holy Spirit) Clarkson directs her thanksgiving in the first stanza to Christ and her petitions in the last stanza to God the Father and, ultimately, to the entire Trinity. Between the opening thanksgiving and closing petitions sits a comprehensive and lovely summary of the operations of the Holy Spirit. It celebrates everything the Bible teaches about the Holy Spirit (the reader is invited to verify this assertion for himself), and, apart from two or three syntactical glitches (“ascended throne,” “his [it is] to strengthen,” and “Father, grant [that] your Holy Spirit in our hearts may rule today”) this summary is clear, well-paced, and poetic.

In the first stanza, the Holy Spirit is a “pledge” for our future glory, but he is also the agent of change in the here-and-now. He is the “crowning gift of resurrection,” partly because Christ promised that the Spirit would come only after he left them, but also because our own “resurrection” from death comes at the call of the Spirit and is attended by his indwelling. Masterfully, Clarkson calls our attention back to the opening words of Scripture, where we first meet the Holy Spirit, and then makes a poetic parallel between the work of God’s Spirit brooding over the deep and its work enlivening dead souls. In an interesting irony, our “Advocate” (stanza 2, line 8) before God, who is seated above the heavens, is “within” where he also dwells—in his temple of flesh.

BLAENWERN is a tune well-known to British Christians as the setting for Wesley’s “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” and for that text it is very well suited. Since Americans have their own tunes for Wesley’s hymn, this one can be applied to Clarkson’s, for which it is equally well suited. It builds slowly, chiefly by parallel ideas that are presented higher each time. The melody of lines 3–4 parallels that of lines 1–2 but ends higher. The melody of line 6 parallels that of line 5 and does not just end higher but is higher. Thus the build-up quickens (note the text of stanza 2) and intensifies as the unit of parallelism contracts (from four measures in lines 1–4 to two measures in lines 5–6) and the ascent becomes more aggressive. The goal is a surge of energy on the high D of line 7: the melody of line 6 is basically a prolongation of C (sol), which, when it rises to the D (la) of line 7, replicates the opening gesture of the tune in a higher octave and more expansive rhythm.

Similarly, each stanza of Clarkson’s text also builds to a late climax. In stanza 1 the “power” and “pledge” of lines 1–4 are more dramatically described as the “crowning gift of resurrection” in line 5 and, then, as the “fullness of the very Godhead” in line 7. In stanza 2 the vitalizing power of the Spirit in lines 1–2 turns personal in lines 3–6 and culminates—like a salvo of fireworks—at “brings to birth and seals and fills us” in line 7. And so the pattern goes. In stanza 3 he who inspired Scripture (line 1), illuminates its pages for us (lines 2–4), and teaches us to pray (lines 5–6) does not stop there but actually also intercedes for us (line 7). Stanza 4 describes spiritual warfare in increasingly vivid language, but it is “by him alone we conquer” in line 7. And, finally, in the last stanza, lines 5–8 combine the “fullness” idea from stanza 1 (line 7) with the “filling” idea of stanza 2 (line 7) in a spectacular paraphrase of Ephesians 3:14–21.