William Pennefather wrote this hymn “For Divine Worship” while he was a Church of England pastor at Barnet, and later at Mildmay, England. He instituted historical conferences that resulted in establishing large religious and charitable organizations. His many hymns, published first in leaflets, were written to be sung at these meetings. Seventy-one of these pieces were published soon after his death in 1873, titled Original Hymns and Thoughts in Verse. John Julian says, “His hymns possess much beauty and earnest simplicity; are rich in evangelical sentiment and doctrine; and are much more musical than is usual with lyrics of their class.” The hymn is based on John 20:21.

Pennefather was born February 5, 1816, in Dublin, Ireland, the son of a baron of the Irish Exchequer. After education at Trinity College, Dublin, he was ordained in 1841 and in succession ministered to several churches in Ireland; from 1848 he pastored in England. He was responsible for introducing into England the Order of Deaconesses. He died April 30, 1873, at Muswell Hill, Middlesex.

BEMERTON was first printed in Filitz’s Choralbuch, 1847, where it was set to a German text, which translated was “O let him whose sorrow.” Bemerton is the name of a parish near Salisbury where George Herbert (see SDAH 9) was the pastor. The charm of this tune lies in its utter simplicity and lack of pretension, using only stepwise progression of the diatonic scale over a compass of an interval of the sixth.

Friedrich Filitz was born March 16, 1804, at Arnstadt, Germany. He worked in Berlin from 1843 until 1847, then moved to Munich. He assisted in the publication of a collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chorales in 1845, and his own Vierstimmiges Choralbuch (Four-Voice Book of Cho- rales), for which he is best known, was published in 1847. He died at Munich, Germany, on December 8, 1876.

📖 Reference: Companion to the Seventh-day Adventist Hymnal by Wayne Hooper and Edward E. White. Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1988.