Only-Begotten, Word of God Eternal — LSB 916

This hymn and today’s Old Testament Lesson belong together. It is an anonymous Latin office hymn, Christe, cunctorum dominator alme, “Christ, kindly ruler of all things,” first found in manuscripts of the eleventh century, and the medieval Church sang it at Vespers for the consecration of a church. Jacob’s dream at Bethel is the classic reading for that occasion: “This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven,” the motto printed at the head of our bulletin. The Latin ran to twelve stanzas. Maxwell Julius Blacker (1822–88) translated it directly from the Latin in 1884, and John Julian reports that he appended two stanzas of his own. No copy of that 1884 printing can now be found, so no one can say for certain whether our stanzas 3 and 4 are Blacker’s, though they follow the Latin only loosely. The English Hymnal of 1906 carried the hymn into wide use. The Lutheran Book of Worship printed six stanzas suited to a church dedication; our hymnal kept four and made it a hymn of invocation, asking God to hear His Church as she gathers to pray. The tune is an eighteenth-century French chant, first printed at Poitiers in 1746.