At my home church in Birmingham, Alabama, and in churches I visit across the country, I often sing G. K. Chesterton’s “O God of Earth and Altar” to Ralph Vaughan Williams’s magnificent setting of Kings Lynn.
Written when Chesterton was in his early thirties, the hymn pulses with the bombast of nineteenth-century Anglican hymnody. Chesterton wouldn’t have taken “bombast” as an insult.
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