Sing We Alleluia!

Russell was an Anglican priest who spent decades in quiet country livings — vicar of Caxton, then Whaddon in Cambridgeshire, with later posts near Liverpool and in Shropshire. The son of a Congregationalist minister, he started out a firm High Churchman and read his way, by way of Augustine, into a moderate Calvinism he kept for the rest of his life. Of the roughly two hundred and seventy hymns he produced, well over a hundred were translations, many carried into English from German — Luther and Paul Gerhardt among them — a good number first gathered in an 1848 hymnal compiled to benefit the German Hospital at Dalston in London. "To Whom Be Glory Evermore," with its repeated "Sing we alleluia," is one of his own texts rather than a translation, the rarer kind in a working life largely spent giving English words to other people's hymns.