Bibliography
At the start of the 19th century the singing of hymns other than metrical psalms in churches was officially disapproved by the Anglican authorities, although there was considerable informal hymn-singing in parishes. Heber, according to the poet John Betjeman, was a professed admirer of the hymns of John Newton and William Cowper, and was one of the first High Church Anglicans to write his own. In all he wrote 57, mainly between 1811 and 1821. Heber wished to publish his hymns in a collection, in which he proposed to include some by other writers. In October 1820 he sought help from the Bishop of London, William Howley, in obtaining official recognition of his collection from the Archbishop of Canterbury. In a noncommittal reply Howley suggested that Heber should publish the hymns, although he proposed to withhold episcopal approval until public reaction could be gauged. Heber began preparing the publication, but was unable to complete arrangements before his departure for India in 1823. The collection was eventually published in 1827, after Heber's death, as Hymns Written and Adapted to the Weekly Church Service of the Year.
Betjeman characterized Heber's style as consciously literary, with careful choices of adjectives and vivid figures of speech: "poetic imagery was as important as didactic truth". A more recent analysis by J. R. Watson draws attention to Heber's tendency to deliver what he terms "a rather obvious sermon", and to his mixing of powerful description with "a rather trite moralism". A handful of Heber's hymns have survived into popular use into the 21st century. One whose popularity has waned is the missionary hymn "From Greenland's Icy Mountains", written in 1819 as part of a country-wide campaign on behalf of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG). Watson describes this as "a conspicuous example of that fervent belief to convert the world to Christianity which led Heber and others to lay down their lives in the mission field", and while widely sung until the second half of the 20th century, it was for instance omitted from the 1982 revision of the Episcopal Church hymnal. Betjeman felt that in the modern world, the words of this hymn seem patronising and insensitive to other beliefs, with references to "...every prospect pleases and only man is vile", and to "the heathen in his blindness [bowing] down to wood and stone". These phrases and the assumptions behind them offended Gandhi, who drew attention to them in a speech to the YMCA in Calcutta (Kolkata) in 1925: "My own experience in my travels throughout India has been to the contrary ... [Man] is not vile. He is as much a seeker after truth as you and I are, possibly more so". Other Heber texts remain popular, and the Dictionary of North American Hymnology noted that most of his hymns remain in use.
