Just as Stanford wished to bring the idiom of song to the Evening Canticles, so did he also experiment with the notion of song as a sacred genre. In moving one step beyond Dvorák’s Biblical Songs, Op 99, for voice and piano (published in 1895), Stanford’s six Bible Songs, Op 113 (first performed by his fellow Irishman and future biographer, Harry Plunket Greene), for voice and organ, are designed principally for the church rather than the concert room. The more ambitious solo ‘verses’ in S S Wesley’s anthems (one thinks particularly of ‘Thou, O Lord God, art a thing that I long for’ from Let us lift up our heart) spring to mind as a precedent and it was repertoire Stanford both knew well and greatly admired, but the more elaborate conception of the organ part (which has more in common with his orchestral songs) together with the scale of gesture and tonal organization tend to suggest the idea of a miniature cantata rather than a song. As if to reinforce this cantata-like impression, Stanford composed a set of Six Hymns (sometimes known as ‘short anthems’, published by Stainer & Bell in 1910) which could be individually appended to each song. Based on well-known hymns of the day (in a manner often deployed by others such as Charles Wood and Basil Harwood), their intention, in an almost Lutheran, not to say Bachian, manner, was to comment theologically on the scriptural meditation of the preceding song whose theme is made explicit in the title. The general texture of the organ accompaniment is also derived from the material of the song which can be heard clearly in the interludes between verses.