I Vow To Thee My Country Mp3 Free Download _VERIFIED

In 1908, Spring Rice was posted to the British Embassy in Stockholm. In 1912, he was appointed as Ambassador to the United States of America, where he influenced the administration of Woodrow Wilson to abandon neutrality and join Britain in the war against Germany. After the United States entered the war, he was recalled to Britain. Shortly before he departed from the US in January 1918, he rewrote and renamed "Urbs Dei", significantly altering the first verse to concentrate on the themes of love and sacrifice rather than "the noise of battle" and "the thunder of her guns", creating a more sombre tone because of the loss of life suffered in the Great War. The first verse in both versions invokes Britain (in the 1912 version, anthropomorphised as Britannia with sword and shield; in the second version, simply called "my country"); the second verse, the Kingdom of Heaven.[citation needed]

I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,

Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;

The love that asks no questions, the love that stands the test,

That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;[9]

The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,

The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

And there's another country, I've heard of long ago,

Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;

We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;

Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;

And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,[10]

And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.[11]

I Vow To Thee My Country Mp3 Free Download

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I heard my country calling, away across the sea,

Across the waste of waters, she calls and calls to me.

Her sword is girded at her side, her helmet on her head,[13]

And around her feet are lying the dying and the dead;

I hear the noise of battle, the thunder of her guns;

I haste to thee, my mother, a son among thy sons.

14for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. 15If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. 16But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them.

1 I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,

entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love:

the love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,

that lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;

the love that never falters, the love that pays the price,

the love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

I am afraid leaving the second verse out on purpose is the misguided belief, that actually dying for your country, let alone your country appealing to you to go to war for her and possibly die in the battle, is politically incorrect.

I think that the second verse probably disappeared from sung versions when I vow to Thee, My Country was included in church hymn books. It then stopped being a patriotic song and became a song of worship. The original poem was called The Two Countries or something like that, and it referred to the writer's devotion to two countries or kingdoms - the Kingdom in which he was born and the Kingdom of Heaven. As a patriotic song, the "homeland" is the focus, but as a religious hymn, the Kingdom of Heaven has to be the focus and editors might have thought that omitting the middle verse would achieve this, with one verse proclaiming love of country and the other proclaiming love of the other, "most great" country in a simple but very effective comparison.

"I'm just looking at a copy of the first edition of 'I vow to thee, my country', in its original version as a unison song, which came into the library in 1921, and it includes only the first verse. I imagine the other verse/s was/were included later when it began to be used as a hymn tune, starting with 'Songs of Praise' (1925)."

I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,

Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;

The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,

That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;

The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,

The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

I heard my country calling, away across the sea,

Across the waste of waters she calls and calls to me.

Her sword is girded at her side, her helmet on her head,

And round her feet are lying the dying and the dead.

I hear the noise of battle, the thunder of her guns,

I haste to thee my mother, a son among thy sons.

And there's another country, I've heard of long ago,

Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;

We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;

Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;

And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,

And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.

I used to think about this when we sang it in chapel on Sundays (the Royal Military Chapel sticking rigidly to a 'God's greatest hits' hymn programme) and the best I could come up with is that the phrase is a statement saying the said country is above all earthly things - not that all earthly things above are being vowed to as well as the country.

"[the first verse] is actually heretical because it actually says that my country's approach to things must be my first call on myself and that my relationship with God or what I believe to be right or wrong is secondary to that."

-- while in fact Spring-Rice went out of his way to qualify that his country is above "all earthly things", so that the text not only does not imply but explicitly exempts anyone's patriotism from taking precedence over their "relationship with God".

I will admit that the syntax is a bit difficult, but the intended reading is clearly "I vow to thee, my country, [who art] above all earthly things [etc.], [to render unto thee] the service of my love." Now it is evident that the good bishop is not exactly a man of letters, but would it be too much to ask of him to consult with somebody fluent in early-20th-century English before allowing the media to spill his spur-of-the-moment fatwas all over the internet?

Her sword is girded at her side, her helmet on her head,

And round her feet are lying the dying and the dead.

I hear the noise of battle, the thunder of her guns,

I haste to thee my mother, a son among thy sons.

There is little doubt that these lines are an appeal to youth to protect their country as they would a mother. That may not be a fashionable statement, but it is one soldiers of all nations will be able to relate to.

In other words, the country of our birth or affiliation is not the most important thing in the world. That is a country within the mind, the heart, the soul; a country that has no boundaries; a country that not everyone knows, but those who do love it will love it more than anything else.

This country Spring Rice speaks of is not defined by power, by the might of armies or the pomp and ceremony of royalty and government. Her fortress is a faithful heart, not a nuclear deterrent; her pride is suffering, not the defeat of others. These lines are telling us that deep within the human spirit is the greatest country of all and that often the human spirit cannot be defeated.

And one by one we will all learn to realise that there is more than one village, one town, one country, one race, one species because in fact we are all one. We are one because our lives and the impact of our thoughts and actions impinge on the entire globe, its weather systems, its flora and fauna. This new country of ours, the country of the mind and heart that seems so sadly distant at times, is within our grasp and our own making and one by one, soul by soul, this is what all right thinking men and women will come to see. The ways of this country are not those of conquest, they do not involve the domination of one race or religion over others; they are the ways of gentleness and above all they are the paths to peace if only we open our hearts to all.

While such a launching, this little-remembered ritual, may not seem so much to many in the thrall of the apotheosis of the 1787 Constitution, it remains a bright metaphor to illustrate the seamlessness of the transition from colony to country in America generally and in Virginia. This vivid drama of a departure joined with that of a prospect shows how far these Virginians had come since April 1774, even as it puts in relief just how significant the next two months, May and June of 1776, would be, culminating as they did with Virginia declaring its independence, establishing a bill of rights, and, two weeks later, completing a written constitution.

These instructions from Virginia counties also concerned the prosecution of the War for Independence that had escalated since the battles of Lexington and Concord a year earlier, and more recently, the burning of Norfolk. All of these variegated county instructions, of course, went to the question of matters of state. In May 1776, as well as in the previous four conventions, delegates to an extra or illegal colonial revolutionary convention met to conduct the business of an independent country before Virginia was independent. For the past two years, it had been dawning on the American colonists that they were and had been countries within a colonial shell. By July 1776, they had shed that shell, turning their attention to preserving and protecting what they considered was their country, states in a European sense. This period between the evaporation of royal authority and the establishment of the independence of the American republics had been a constitutional void, and the Founders knew it, many marveling that Americans had resisted invitations to anarchy. 2351a5e196