This is a beautiful a capella rendition of O, God Our Help in Ages Past–and would you believe we used to sing this in assembly at high school? It’s true. And then along came the Supreme Court with its amazing discovering that what the Constitution really meant all along was that Christianity may never be expressed in public–and we see with what result. God forgive us and defend us, and bring us back to our senses.
One of my favorite hymns. And when I was in grade school, we also sang a hymn at assemblies, and listened to a psalm as well. I was an atheist at the time, and my mother was a militant atheist, but neither of us felt “offended” or “threatened” by any of this, and my mother would never have demanded that it be ended. She actually thought the psalms were beautiful poetry, just as she thought Virgil’s “Aeneid” was magnificent poetry — and she didn’t believe in the Roman gods, either.
By the way, I was actually born with Virgil ringing in my ears. As my mother was being wheeled into the delivery room to have me, she was shouting lines from Aeneas’s address to his troops from Book I, especially his ringing promise that after all the terrors and hardships that he and his men had been through, “Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit!” — “Someday perhaps this too will be a happy memory.” (Since my service in the Air Force, I kind of like to translate the line as, “Someday this will make a great war story.”)
And the one hospital orderly turns to the other and says, “Now there’s something you don’t see every day…”