Fairest Lord Jesus, Ruler of
all nature,
O Thou of God and man the Son,
Thee will I cherish, Thee will I honor,
Thou, my soul’s glory, joy and crown.
Fair are the meadows, fairer still the woodlands,
Robed in the blooming garb of
spring;
Jesus is fairer, Jesus is
purer,
Who makes the woeful heart to
sing.
Fair is the sunshine,
Fairer still the moonlight,
And all the twinkling starry host;
Jesus shines brighter, Jesus shines purer
Than all the angels heaven can boast.
All fairest beauty, heavenly
and earthly,
Wondrously, Jesus, is found in Thee;
None can be nearer, fairer or dearer,
Than Thou, my Savior, art to me.
Beautiful Savior! Lord of all
the nations!
Son of God and Son of Man!
Glory and honor, praise, adoration,
Now and forever more be Thine.
"Fairest Lord Jesus",
also known as "Beautiful Savior", is a Christianhymn. According
to some accounts, it was called "Crusader's Hymn" because it was sung
by GermanCrusaders as
they made their way to the Holy Land.
But William Jensen Reynolds
dismisses as "completely erroneous" any association of this hymn with
the Crusades.
The words may have originated
in the Jesuit Order, which came into being after the
Crusades.
The tune emerges in Franz
Liszt's oratorio Legend of Saint Elizabeth—wherein the tune forms
part of the "Crusader's March"—but no evidence of the tune exists
prior to 1842, when the hymn appeared in Schlesische Volkslieder.
ST. ELIZABETH appears to be an
eighteenth-century tune from the Glaz area of Silesia. It has always been
associated with this text. No factual data exists for the legend that this text
and tune date back to the twelfth-century crusades, although those apocryphal
stories explain one of the names by which this tune is known, namely,
CRUSADER'S HYMN. After Franz Liszt used the tune for a crusaders' march in his
oratorio The Legend of St. Elizabeth (1862), the tune also became
known as ST.ELIZABETH. The tune consists primarily of a few melodic sequences
and their variations. It could either be sung gently, perhaps with guitar and
flute accompaniment, or it could be sung with great power with almost full
organ for stanzas 1 and 4. Try singing in harmony with no accompaniment at all
for stanzas 2 and 3. Sing in four long lines rather than eight short phrases.
--Psalter Hymnal Handbook,
Jesus
