Bishop Reginald Heber wrote "Abash'd be all the boast of Age" as a dedicated liturgical piece for Epiphany. It made its first appearance in his posthumous collection, Hymns Written and Adapted to the Weekly Church Service of the Year, which was published by his widow in 1827.
The piece stands on pages 27 and 28 of the original volume, arranged in 5 stanzas of 4 lines each. It was designed to serve as the first of two selected hymns intended for the First Sunday after Epiphany.
While the hymn in its full, original form never achieved widespread popularity or common usage within the church, parts of the text found significant success through alteration. Specifically, stanzas II through V were extracted to form a cento beginning with the line "O Wisdom, whose unfading power."
This revised version was adopted by Benjamin Hall Kennedy for his 1863 Hymnologia Christiana as Number 229, featuring unique editorial changes. A similarly altered version of this cento was later included in the Methodist Sunday School Hymn Book in 1879, where it was cataloged for younger generations as Number 77.
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