William Williams, author of 'Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah', was among the finest and most prolific hymnwriters the British Isles has produced. Yet most people in English churches are unfamiliar with William Williams or the other 800+ hymns because the majority were in Welsh.
William Williams put into verse the spirit and character of the Welsh Methodist Revival of 1762, in which he was a key figure. One of the chief things I appreciate about his hymns is how they articulate the intimate, individual process that goes on between a soul and the Saviour at conversion and throughout a true Christian life - a process which those who went through the Revival had experienced themselves in such a profound way. William Williams' hymns are intensely personal and individually challenging, often written in the first person. This seems to be particularly characteristic of hymns from these times of great revival. W. Vernon Higham's 'I saw a new vision of Jesus', although by a present-day writer, is very much in that tradition. These are not the sort of general, formulaic words that can be happily sung by those merely going through the motions but words for serious, all-out Christianity.
Williams' hymns articulate the utter hopelessness and desperation of our state without God but also express total conviction about the efficacy of Jesus' blood and the security of our eternal salvation. They describe the need for continued, daily dependence on Christ which these spiritual giants understood and practiced so well, but also communicate a deep delight in Jesus Christ and an intense love for him born of a profound understanding and personal experience of the great doctrines of grace. All these were themes which characterised the 1762 Revival.
History has rightly discarded much of the hymnody of past generations but Williams' hymns have an enduring worth and deserve to be known beyond the small circles of Welsh-speaking Christians who know and sing them. Some have been translated into English but most have not. Those translations that do exist are of variable quality. Some are simply clunky and difficult to sing. Others have only loosely conveyed the original words and some, worse still, have watered down Williams' out-and-out Calvinistic theology to fit with the translators' own liberal inclinations.
In appreciation of the blessing that William Williams' works have been to me personally, I'm contributing some English translations in the hope that they will bring his thoughts to a wider audience. In writing these I have tried to be as faithful as possible to Williams' original meaning but at the same time to make them poetic and singable, preserving the original metre so that the original Welsh tunes can still be used. These translations are copyright but are free to use for worship purposes providing users acknowledge the source in any printed materials.
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