'O God, Our Help in Ages Past' (1719) is the supreme English hymn on the theme of divine eternity confronting human mortality. Written by Isaac Watts as a paraphrase of Psalm 90 - the only psalm attributed to Moses - it has served as the defining text for national services of remembrance in Britain for nearly three centuries, combining the grandeur of Moses' wilderness meditation with the measured cadences of English verse.
Isaac Watts and Psalm Paraphrase
Isaac Watts (1674-1748) is the father of English hymnody. Before Watts, English congregational singing consisted almost entirely of metrical psalms - translations of the Hebrew psalms into English verse, following the Psalter traditions of Calvin's Geneva and the Elizabethan church. Watts's innovation was to 'Christianize' the psalms: to read them through the lens of New Testament fulfillment and to compose his own hymns alongside the psalms. His 1719 collection The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament contained 138 psalm paraphrases, including this version of Psalm 90, which Watts titled 'Man Frail, and God Eternal.'
Psalm 90: Moses and Mortality
Psalm 90 bears the superscription 'A prayer of Moses the man of God' - the only psalm attributed to Moses. Scholars date it variously, but the tradition associates it with the period of wilderness wandering, when an entire generation of Israelites died without entering the promised land. It is a meditation on the disproportion between divine eternity and human brevity.
Psalm 90:1-2 (KJV): 'Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.' The psalm establishes the eternal God as the only stable dwelling amid the impermanence of human life.
Psalm 90:4 (KJV): 'For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.' Watts's paraphrase - 'A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone' - is one of the most admired lines in English hymnody for its compression and accuracy.
Psalm 90:9-10 (KJV): 'For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told. The days of our years are threescore years and ten.' The seventy-year lifespan, the days passing as a story told, the generations swept away as a flood - all are directly rendered in Watts's stanzas.
Watts's Paraphrase
Watts does not simply translate Psalm 90; he interprets it through Christian theology. The God who is 'our help in ages past, our hope for years to come' is Christ as well as the God of Moses - the eternal Word who was 'from everlasting to everlasting.' The refuge that is God himself (Psalm 90:1 - 'thou hast been our dwelling place') becomes the 'shelter from the stormy blast' in Watts's verse.
John Wesley later altered the opening line from 'Our God, our help in ages past' to 'O God, our help in ages past' - the version that is universally used today. Wesley felt the possessive 'our' was presumptuous; Watts's original gave the hymn a more communal, confessional claim.
The Tune 'St. Anne'
The tune universally associated with the hymn is 'St. Anne,' attributed to William Croft (1708). It is a dignified, processional tune in common time, whose opening phrase (famously shared with Bach's 'St. Anne' fugue, BWV 552) has become inseparable from the text. The combination of Watts's spare, measuring verse and Croft's stately tune creates a music of collective solemnity appropriate to occasions of national remembrance.
British National Use
The hymn has been sung at British services of national remembrance since at least the early 19th century. It is performed at the Cenotaph in London on Remembrance Sunday and at services marking major national events. Winston Churchill chose it for the shipboard worship service with Franklin Roosevelt aboard HMS Prince of Wales in August 1941, during the negotiation of the Atlantic Charter - a service photographed and reported worldwide as a symbol of Anglo-American Christian civilization against Nazism.
Legacy
The hymn is athe defining English expression of the Augustinian theme: 'Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.' The eternal God as the only adequate dwelling for beings who are themselves temporal is the hymn's theological center, and it is a center that speaks with equal relevance in every generation - which is why the hymn has outlasted the century that produced it by three hundred years.