The day of the Lord is at hand.
Joel 1:15
Words: Charles Kingsley (1819–1875), alt. The text below appeared in Hymns of the Ages, third series (Boston, Massachusetts: James R. Osgood, 1877), pages 3–4.
Music: Remember the Poor traditional Irish melody (🔊 pdf nwc).
If you know when this hymn was written,
The day of the Lord is at hand, at hand;
The storms roll up the sky;
A nation sleeps starving on heaps of gold;
All dreamers toss and sigh;
When the pain is sorest, the child is born,
The night is darkest before the morn;
And the day of the Lord is at hand, at hand,
The day of the Lord is at hand.
Gather you, gather you, angels of God,
Chivalry, justice and truth;
Come, for the earth is grown coward and old;
Come down and renew us her youth!
Freedom, self-sacrifice, mercy and love,
Haste to the battlefield, stoop from above
For the day of the Lord is at hand, at hand,
The day of the Lord is at hand.
Gather you, gather you, hounds of hell—
Famine, and plague and war;
Idleness, bigotry, cant and misrule,
Gather—and fall in the snare!
Hirelings and Mammonites, pedants and knaves,
Crawl to the battle, or sneak to your graves,
Now the day of the Lord is at hand,
The day of the Lord is at hand.
Who would sit down and whine for a lost age of gold,
While the Lord of all ages is here?
True hearts will leap at the trumpet of God,
And those who can suffer can dare.
Each old age of gold was an iron age, too,
And the meekest of saints may find stern work to do
In the day of the Lord at hand, at hand,
In the day of the Lord at hand.