Isaac Watts, The Psalms of Da­vid, 1719.

Duke Street, at­trib­ut­ed to John Hat­ton, 1793 (MIDI, NWC, PDF).

• Galilee (Armes), Phil­ip Armes, in Hymns An­cient and Mo­dern, 1875 (MIDI, NWC, PDF)
• Rimington, Fran­cis Duck­worth, 1904 (MIDI, NWC, PDF)
• Truro, Williams’ Psalm­o­dia Evan­gel­i­ca, 1789 (MIDI, NWC, PDF)

Perhaps one of the most in­ter­est­ing oc­ca­sions on which this hymn was used was that on which King George, the sa­ble, of the South Sea Is­lands, but of bless­ed mem­o­ry, gave a new con­sti­tu­tion to his peo­ple, ex­chang­ing a hea­then for a Chris­tian form of gov­ern­ment. Un­der the spread­ing branch­es of the ban­yan trees sat some thou­sand na­tives from Ton­ga, Fi­ji, and Sa­moa, on Whit­sun­day, 1862, as­sem­bled for Di­vine wor­ship. Fore­most amongst them all sat King George him­self. Around him were seat­ed old chiefs and war­ri­ors who had shared with him the dan­gers and for­tunes of ma­ny a battle—men whose eyes were dim, and whose pow­er­ful frames were bowed down with the weight of years. But old and young alike re­joiced to­ge­ther in the joys of that day, their fac­es most of them ra­di­ant with Chris­tian joy, love, and hope. It would be im­poss­i­ble to de­scribe the deep feel­ing man­i­fest­ed when the sol­emn serv­ice be­gan, by the en­tire au­di­ence sing­ing Dr. Watts’ hymn…

Who so much as they could real­ize the full mean­ing of the po­et’s words? For they had been res­cued from the dark­ness of hea­then­ism and can­ni­bal­ism and they were that day met for the first time un­der a Chris­tian con­sti­tu­tion, un­der a Christian king, and with Christ Him­self reign­ing in the hearts of most of those pre­sent. That was in­deed Christ’s king­dom set up in the earth.

Notes on the Meth­od­ist Hymn Book, by G. J. Ste­ven­son