The author of this text first published the poem in his A Garland of Verse, 1961, and then in Hymnal for Church and School, 1964. In 1977 a committee representing the Anglican, Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches in Australian Hymn Book. They included this consecration hymn, modernizing archaic pronouns. SDAH has used their version, omitting the fourth stanza.

 John (Jack) Copley Winslow was born August 18, 1882, at Hanworth, Middlesex, England. He was educated at Eton, Balliol (Oxford), and Wells theological college, and was ordained in the Church of England in 1907. After serving as priest in Southwark, as curate of Wimbledon, and as a lecturer at St. Augustine’s College, Canterbury, he went to India in 1914 as a missionary for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. For 19 years he worked in four different cities, and as examining chaplain to the Bishop of Bombay. Back in England in 1936, he has a distinguished career as pastor of Milton, Kent; Beckley, Sussex; and Hanworth churches. He was chaplain at Bryanston School in Dorset for six years, and a t Lee Abbey for 14 years before retirement to Godalming in 1962. He died april 1, 1974. Among a number of books he wrote are the Christian Approach to the Hindu, 1958, and The Dawn OF Indian Freedom,1931.

SLANE is the name of the hill near Tara in County Meath, Ireland; the melody comes from an Irish folk song. The arrangement SDAH uses is by Melvin West (1930-  ; see Biographies). See SDAH 547 for more comments on this tune, where it is in a unison setting.