A children's temple here we build

"A children's temple here we build" is a nineteenth-century hymn written by the Scottish-born poet and editor James Montgomery. He composed the piece specifically to celebrate the opening of the very first dedicated Sunday School building in Wincobank, a district in Sheffield, England.

The original manuscript of the hymn, which is preserved in the Wincobank Hall Collection of Manuscripts, is dated December 18, 1840, and signed with Montgomery's initials, "J. M."

The brand-new school building officially opened on April 13, 1841. For the opening service, the text of Montgomery's lyric was printed on a broadsheet fly-leaf so the congregation and children could sing it together.

In 1853, Montgomery decided to preserve the piece permanently by including it as entry number 313 in his volume Original Hymns. Published on page 333, the text consisted of six stanzas of four lines and carried the title "The erection of a Sunday School."

Over the following decades, the hymn found its way into several denominational collections. For its inclusion in the Methodist Sunday School Hymn Book of 1879 (as hymn number 512), the editors chose to omit the fourth stanza entirely and introduced several minor textual alterations.

An interesting historical footnote connects this occasion to another well-known writer. The popular children's poet and hymnist Ann Taylor (writing under her married name, Mrs. Ann Gilbert) also composed a special hymn titled "We thank the Lord of heaven and earth" for the exact same opening service in Wincobank. However, unlike Montgomery's piece, Gilbert's hymn did not find its way into common use in later collections.