Be present, ye faithful, joyful and triumphant

Author: John Francis Wade

John Francis Wade (1711 – 16 August 1786) was an English hymnist who is credited with writing and composing the hymn "Adeste Fideles" (which was later translated to "O Come All Ye Faithful"). Born either in England or in Douai, France, Wade fled to France after the Jacobite rising of 1745 was crushed. As a Catholic layman, he lived with exiled English Catholics in France for the rest of his life. There, he taught music and worked on church music for private use. Jacobite symbolism Professor Bennett Zon, Head of the Department of Music at Durham University, has noted that Wade's Roman Catholic liturgical books were often decorated with Jacobite floral imagery, and argued that the texts had coded Jacobite meanings. Zon describes the… Go to person page >

*Adeste fideles laeti triumphantes. [Christmas.] As to the authorship and actual date of this hymn nothing positive is known. It has been ascribed to St. Bonaventura, but is found in no edition of his Works. Most probably it is a hymn of the 17th or 18th century, and of French or German authorship. The text appears in three forms. The first is in 8 stanzas, the second, that in use in France, and the third the English use, both in Latin and English. The full text [is] from Thesaurus Animae Christianae, Mechlin, N.D. (where it is given as a second sequence for Christmas and said to be "Ex Graduali Cisterciensi"….

Translations in common use:—
9. Be present, ye faithful. By J. M. Neale. Published in the Hymnal Noted, enlarged edition, 1858. Although opening with the same line it is a different translation from that in Chope's Hymnal. The second stanza of Chope reads: "Very God of Very God," and this "God of God, eternal."

-- Excerpts from John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)