For All the Saints: A Hymn and Tune Celebrating the Nameless

When you turn to November 1st in your Hymnbook Treasures calendar, you’ll find the opening verse of one of the most beloved hymns in the English language:

For all the saints, who from their labors rest,
Who Thee by faith before the world confessed,
Thy name, O Jesus, be forever blest.

It was written in 1864 by William Walsham How, then the rector of a small parish in Whittington, Shropshire, on the border of England and Wales. He later became a bishop in East London, then Bishop of Wakefield, and he was known affectionately as “the children’s bishop.” He turned down promotions more than once. That quiet, unambitious spirit is easy to hear in what he wrote.

The hymn is a meditation on two things. The first is Hebrews 12, which tells us we are surrounded by “a great cloud of witnesses.” The second is a single line from the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in the communion of saints.” How’s original version had eleven stanzas, which is why most hymnals print only six or eight. Its first line originally read “For all Thy saints.” He softened it to “the” a few years later.

What strikes me most is who is missing. In all eleven stanzas, How never names a single saint. No Peter, no Paul, no Augustine, no Luther. He mentions the apostles, the evangelists, and the martyrs, but only as companies of people. Everyone else is simply “the saints.”

I think that was deliberate, and I think it was appropriate. The Bible uses “saints” for ordinary believers: the farmers, the mothers, the merchants, the faithful in every little congregation Paul ever wrote to. Most of the people who kept the faith alive for two thousand years were never famous. They prayed, worshiped, raised their children in the faith, and handed it down to the next generation. How’s hymn thanks God for all of them, the ones with names in the history books and the far larger multitude whose names are known only to Him.

If that sounds familiar, it’s the same thread running through my earlier post on hymns whose authors we’ll never know: a nameless chain of faithful people, each passing something precious to the next without asking to be remembered.

There’s one more detail that makes this hymn feel providential. The words are only half the story of how most of us know it. For its first four decades, “For All the Saints” was sung to other tunes. The melody most of us now associate with it wasn’t written until 1906, forty-two years later, when the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote it for a new hymnal. He named it SINE NOMINE, which is Latin for “without name.”

Nobody sat down and arranged that. A melody was written four decades after the words, and it was given a title that perfectly echoes the hymn’s theme: a song for the nameless saints, set to a tune named for them. As with Charles Wesley, the words came first and the tune came later, borrowed clothing for poetry that was already complete. But here the tune’s own name carries the message of the text.

So when you read the first verse on November 1st, or better yet, sing it in church on All Saints Day, you’re doing something far older than 1864. You’re joining a company of the faithful who are mostly nameless to us, and giving thanks, as Bishop How did, for every one of them.

We hope that Hymnbook Treasures – and the QR codes we’ve included on every page -- encourages and equips you to dig deeply into the hymns you know by heart, and even those you’ve never heard of before!