God Is in His Holy Temple

“God Is in His Holy Temple” was first included in the Latter-day Saint hymnal in 1927. The 1985 hymnal lists this hymn text as anonymous, and its earliest publication as Hymns of the Spirit (1864), a Unitarian collection published at Boston by Samuel Longfellow and Samuel Johnson. Recent research, however, reveals this hymn was published as early as 1818, and was written by Samuel Woodworth (1784-1842), author of the poem “The Old Oaken Bucket.”

“God Is in His Holy Temple” appears in Woodworth’s first volume of poetry, The Poems, Odes, Songs, and Other Metrical Effusions of Samuel Woodworth (1818), in four stanzas of eight lines, under the title “God In His Temple.”

Only the first two stanzas of  Woodworth’s poem were retained in Hymns of the Spirit, and these were altered extensively from the original. This altered form of the hymn is the one that appears in the Latter-day Saint hymnal, but with a few additional text changes in the second stanza.

The second stanza as it appears in Hymns of the Spirit is as follows:

God is in His holy temple;—
….In the pure and holy mind;
In the reverent heart and simple;
….In the soul from sense refined:
Then let every low emotion
….Banish far and silent be,
And our souls in pure devotion,
….Lord, be temples worthy Thee!

In the current Latter-day Saint hymnal the second stanza reads:

God is in His holy temple,
….In the pure and holy mind,
In the rev’rent heart and simple;
….In the soul from sin refined.
Banish then each base emotion.
….Lift us up, O Lord, to thee,
Let our souls, in pure devotion,
….Temples for thy worship be.

These changes, other than the substitution of the word “sin” for “sense,” were not made by a Latter-day Saint editor; this altered version can be found as early as 1897, in a Jewish hymnal entitled the Union Hymnal.

Notes:
*The first two lines of “God Is in His Holy Temple” are based on Habukkuk 2:20, which reads: “But the LORD is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him.”
*“God Is in His Holy Temple” appears in Longfellow and Johnson’s A Book of Hymns for Public and Private Devotion (Cambridge, Mass.: Metcalf and Company, 1846), no. 466, in almost identical form as found in Hymns of the Spirit, the most noticeable change being in the second line of the first stanza: “Thoughts of earth be silent now” instead of “Earthly thoughts be silent now.” Longfellow is the younger brother of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
*The tune most commonly associated with Woodworth’s poem “The Old Oaken Bucket” is found in the Latter-day Saint hymnal as the musical setting for “Do What Is Right.”

Sources:
*Samuel Woodworth, The Poems, Odes, Songs, and Other Metrical Effusions of Samuel Woodworth (New York: Abraham Asten and Matthias Lopez, 1818), 273-274; Samuel Longfellow and Samuel Johnson, Hymns of the Spirit (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1864), 21; Central Conference of American Rabbis, Union Hymnal (New York: Wm. C. Popper & Co., 1897), 24-25.