Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote 'God of Grace and God of Glory' for the opening of Riverside Church in New York City in October 1930, and the hymn bears the marks of that specific historical moment. The United States was entering the Great Depression; the optimism of the Progressive Era had shattered in the stock market collapse of 1929; and Fosdick, the most famous liberal Protestant preacher in America, was dedicating a new cathedral of progressive Christianity at a moment when the world's capacity for progress seemed suddenly in question.
The opening address - 'God of grace and God of glory, on thy people pour thy power' - draws from Ephesians 3:16's prayer that God would 'grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being.' Fosdick's petition for power is not triumphalism but a recognition of insufficiency: the people gathered to serve God in challenging times need more than human courage and human wisdom. The appeal to God's glory and grace frames human action within divine enablement.
The refrain - 'Grant us wisdom, grant us courage for the facing of this hour; for the facing of this hour' - became the hymn's most-quoted phrase, repeated at moments of historical crisis, political uncertainty, and institutional challenge throughout the twentieth century. 'The facing of this hour' is Fosdick's characteristically modern framing: each generation must face its own specific historical moment with appropriate wisdom and courage, and the resources for doing so come from God. This is not abstract but concrete: wisdom for the economic catastrophe of 1930, courage for the political catastrophe of 1939, discernment for the civil rights confrontations of the 1960s.
The second stanza - 'Lo! the hosts of evil round us scorn thy Christ, assail his ways!' - reflects Fosdick's apocalyptic realism. He believed in human progress but not in inevitable progress: the forces of injustice, dehumanization, and spiritual corruption were real and powerful, and the church was called to confront them rather than accommodate them. The phrase 'fears that long have bound us' draws on Isaiah 61:1's vision of liberty to the captives and the opening of prison doors - applied here to the spiritual and social captivities that prevent the church from its prophetic calling.
The third stanza petitions specifically for freedom from 'the love of pleasure,' the 'pride of place,' and the 'force of habit' - the internal obstacles to Christian witness that are as dangerous as external opposition. This psychological realism about the church's temptations reflects Fosdick's pastoral intelligence: the greatest threat to prophetic witness is not persecution but self-satisfied comfort. The petition for cure of 'the wayward and the weak' draws on Jesus's own characterization of his mission in Matthew 9:12 - 'It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.'
The hymn was set to 'Cwm Rhondda,' John Hughes's great Welsh tune composed in 1905 for the text 'Guide me, O thou great Jehovah.' The melody's surging, powerful character - with its broad sweep and noble climax - matched Fosdick's equally ambitious text. The combination became immediately canonical in American mainline Protestantism and has remained so, sung at presidential inaugurations, major ecumenical gatherings, and cathedral dedications.
Fosdick's theology was controversial in his own time - his 1922 sermon 'Shall the Fundamentalists Win?' triggered a denominational controversy that led to his departure from the Presbyterian Church - but his hymn transcended those controversies. Its prayer for wisdom and courage is as usable by conservatives as by liberals, as urgently needed in evangelical congregations as in mainline ones. The specific theological commitments of the Social Gospel have dated, but the cry for divine empowerment in facing the particular challenges of each historical moment remains permanently timely.