I had the misfortune of attending a funeral at a United Church (of Canada) a while back; the disagreeable aspect of the service lay not in lamenting the demise of the person in the coffin, but in being exposed to the United Church’s butchery of the hymns. Lines such as:

Father-like, he tends and spares us;
well our feeble frame he knows;

were expunged and replaced with the atrocious mother-like God gently bears us (that is the gist of it – I am going by memory). I expressed my contempt for the deranged alterations by singing the correct words with a gusto sufficient to drown the tentative efforts of the others in my pew; I think there were a few conversions.

Christmas carols are being subjected to a similar assault:

Christmas carols are being re-written to make them politically correct, a music teacher has claimed.

Nic Robinson was surprised to find the words to Hark! The Herald Angels Sing have been changed to be ‘gender inclusive’ by removing the words ‘man’, ‘men’ and ‘sons’.

Attending a carol service at his 13-year-old daughter Hannah’s school, he noticed that in verse two the line ‘Pleased as man with man to dwell’ was changed to ‘Pleased with us in flesh to dwell’ on the printed sheet.

Then in the next verse the lines ‘Born that man no more may die, Born to raise the sons of Earth, Born to give them second birth’ were changed to ‘Born that we no more may die, Born to raise us from the earth, Born to give us second birth.’

The disgruntled parent went on to note:

I am sure some bishop will write now, explaining, kindly, that hymns have been evolving throughout the ages and that this one, in particular, has known many versions,’ he said.

‘May I ask the bishop not to bother, but rather to spend his time in contacting the people who have defaced my favourite carol. They need to be told of one glaring omission in their revision, namely the line which follows the one quoted above. This should surely now read ‘Jesus our Epersonnuel’.

Bishops get no respect these days. I wonder why.