Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.
Psalm 51:10
Words: Anne Steele, Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional, 1760.
Music: Bemerton (Greatorex) Henry W. Greatorex, 1849 (🔊 pdf nwc).
If you know where to get a good picture of Steele or Greatorex (head-and-shoulders, at least 200×300 pixels), would you ?
How helpless guilty nature lies,
Unconscious of its load!
The heart, unchanged, can never rise
To happiness and God.
Can aught, beneath a power divine,
The stubborn will subdue?
’Tis Thine, almighty Spirit! Thine,
To form the heart anew.
’Tis Thine, the passions to recall,
And upward bid them rise;
To make the scales of error fall
From reason’s darkened eyes;
To chase the shades of death away,
And bid the sinner live;
A beam of Heav’n, a vital ray,
’Tis Thine alone to give.
O change these wretched hearts of ours,
And give them life divine;
Then shall our passions and our powers
Almighty Lord! be Thine.