A man of many talents, that was how one might describe the Englishman, John Bowring. And though he could have kept his many talents for his own self-gratification, he apparently knew his heavenly “Father and Friend, Thy Light, Thy Love” so well that he acknowledged Him in dozens of hymns, including this one in which he called Him by four names. (See image of him here, showing him two years after the hymn was published.) The way John addressed Him suggests an intimacy and identification of the source of his talents that he would put to use over a lifetime in his native land and in many places abroad. John did not specify what prompted him to compose these words, but perhaps his poetry and the way he conducted his life revealed his motives. A person with so many God-given gifts isn’t necessarily obliged to say more if he lives his beliefs for everyone to observe. See what you think of John Bowring and what he had to say about God.
Father. This was the first name that captured John’s attention as he sang to Him, and this was evident in the hymn’s first word, but also expressed in his original third verse that is perhaps rarer, in that it is not often included in today’s hymnals. This father is to be ‘hallowed’, John said, as well as the One who is counted upon for ‘strength, wisdom, (and) goodness’, qualities that we esteem in earthly fathers. He occupies a ‘throne’ also, since he is the head of our spiritual household, as a mortal father likewise does in our physical homes as the figure of ultimate authority for his ‘children’ (v.4). How about Friend? Verse two says this Divine Being is a ‘voice we hear’, a ‘presence (we) feel’, and is that not true of one’s closest friend/s, a person or group that is present perhaps when we need someone else to hear our thoughts and just be with us to relieve the lonesomeness? Light and how it impacted John is throughout most of his poetic stanzas in ‘Father and Friend, Thy Light, Thy Love’, suggesting this was John’s favorite characteristic of Him. He was ‘beaming’ and ‘gild(ing)’ the very ‘heavens above’ (v.1); and even if He was ‘too pure for mortal sight’, John could imagine Him surrounded by ‘clouds’ thus making Him ‘invisible’ (v.2). John could also see the evidence of Him across ‘the maze of time’, among the ‘infinity of space’, and was able to ‘trace’ God’s ‘footsteps’ (v.4). That speaks to us still today, for none of us has or ever will see Him with our human eyes, at least until eternity, but we can see the light and evidence of His being in so many ways. Love. God is love, a testimony that is shared by those mortals to whom God was closest, in both the Old and New Testaments, like Moses (Deuteronomy 7:9), David and Solomon (1 Kings 8:23; 1 Chronicles 6:14), and John (1 John 4:8), and then by this other John named Bowring. He says it best perhaps in his song’s verse five with the reminder that with love we need not ‘faint nor fear’, and that His people are immersed in Him when gathered together. That’s a warm, contented feeling, if you’ve ever experienced it when in the company of others who are in His love. He’s ‘everywhere’, and His people ‘cannot be’ truly satisfied when elsewhere.
We can speculate that John Bowring may have carried all of these characteristics of God with him in the many venues across the 80 years he lived upon the Earth. Perhaps they helped ground John in the fundamentals of who he was, and how his Creator had gifted him. This man spoke dozens of languages and served his country and fellow men in various ways as an editor (Westminster Review) and statesman (in France, China, Hong Kong, Siam, and Italy, and as a member of England’s Parliament), especially as he moved about in the area of various business enterprises in England and internationally also, besides writing or translating poetry. His hymnody is a window into how John carried himself and how he was so evidently a success story in so many things that he did, perhaps because he honored God deep within himself. To promote business in which he was involved at one point (in 1841), Bowring reportedly said "Jesus Christ is free trade and free trade is Jesus Christ". He also was outspoken regarding equal voting rights for women and the abolition of slavery. Bowring’s life was really a full one, not without faults for sure, but he used what God had given him to the fullest. Perhaps what he had to say about his Father, Friend, Light, and Love was an expression of what he’d already seen of Him as a young man by 1824, but also what a firm foundation he had that helped him live the next 40-50 years with such purpose. When God’s present, just look at the kind of life someone can live.
See here for all the original verses of the hymn, and the year in which the words were first written/published: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/f/f/t/t/fftltlov.htm
See here for biography of the author: https://hymnary.org/person/Bowring_John -- also, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bowring and here: John Bowring
See information on the image here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sir_John_Bowring_by_John_King.jpg... The author died in 1847, so this work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 100 years or fewer. This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office) before January 1, 1931….image found inside this document: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bowring
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