How the Church of England can – and will – endureThough with a scornful wonder
Men see her sore opprest,
By schisms rent asunder,
By heresies distrest,
Yet Saints their watch are keeping,
Their cry goes up, ‘How long?’
And soon the night of weeping
Shall be the morn of song.Samuel Stone’s hymn, replete with already archaic spelling, expresses the Victorian hand-wringing over the supposedly dangerous heresies of John William Colenso, Bishop of Natal from 1853 to 1883. The first Lambeth Conference was called in 1867 to address the problem. Stone’s hymn, written a year earlier, sums up the mood of many. Everything is going wrong, the godless mock, and all we can do is hold out for ‘the consummation of peace for evermore’.
