Religious Education Archive: 19th Century Mormon Publications - Collection of Sacred Hymns for the Church in Europe

Digital Collections at BYU > Mormon Publications: 19th Century > Learn More About These Titles > Collection of sacred hymns, for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, in Europe, 1840

A collection of sacred hymns, for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, in Europe. Selected by Brigham Young, Parley P. Pratt, and John Taylor. Published by order of a general conference, and for sale at 149, Oldham Road, Manchester, and by agents throughout England. Manchester, Printed by W. R. Thomas, Spring Gardens, 1840.

324, [12]p. 11 cm.

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At the conference where it was agreed to publish the Millennial Star, the Twelve also resolved to publish a hymnal for the use of the British Saints. Brigham Young, Parley Pratt, and John Taylor were designated to pick the hymns and see the book through the press. On May 27, 1840, Young, Pratt, and Taylor, assisted by William Clayton—a British convert who, in 1846, would write “Come, Come Ye Saints”—began selecting the hymns. A month later the manuscript was ready for the printer, and by the second week in July, 3000 copies were off the press.

This first British hymnal kept 78 hymns from Emma Smith’s 1835 hymnal and added 193 others. Forty-four of the new hymns were by Parley Pratt; seventeen were taken from Parley Pratt’s Millennium and Other Poems.

Although the hymnal was intended for the Church in Great Britain, it became the basis of all the official LDS hymnals during the rest of the nineteenth century. The immense number of converts from the British Isles, combined with the expense of book publishing in the Great Basin, caused thirteen editions to be published in England before a hymnal was finally printed in Salt Lake City in 1871. Thereafter British and Salt Lake hymnals continued to be published as part of the same series until 1912, when the LDS Church adopted the Latter-day Saints’ Psalmody.

Excerpted and edited from Peter Crawley and Chad J. Flake, A Mormon Fifty: an exhibition in the Harold B. Lee Library in conjunction with the annual conference of the Mormon History Association. (Provo, Utah, Friends of the Brigham Young University Library, 1984). Item 15, p. [14–15].

Used by permission of the authors.