Ad laudes Salvatoris

The late medieval Latin sequence "Ad laudes Salvatoris" is a proper liturgical prose composed for the common festivals of church leaders. The text is preserved across several notable Germanic and Low Countries missals, documenting its regional use in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Philipp Wackernagel published the text as entry Number 255 in the first volume of his Das deutsche Kirchenlied, relying on the incunabula text found in the Lübeck Missal published around 1480. John Mason Neale subsequently edited and printed the full text on page 231 of his Sequentiae ex Missalibus Germanicis, Anglicis, Gallicis, aliisque Medii Aevi Collectae (1852). Neale drew his text from the Utrecht Missal of 1513 and the Salzburg Missal of 1515, where it served as a proper sequence for various localized saints' days.

A liturgical distinction arose concerning its exact assignment. While the original rubrics of the continental missals mapped the hymn to the festivals of a Bishop and Confessor, Neale categorized it structurally within the general Common of a Confessor who was not a Bishop. Hermann Adalbert Daniel later reproduced Neale's text and critical apparatus in his fifth volume, and Joseph Kehrein indexed the sequence as entry Number 465 in his late nineteenth-century compilation.

English Translations

The Latin prose entered nineteenth-century English hymnody through a single verified translation:

The English version, "O ye who fear, yet fearing long," was produced by "S. M.," the pseudonym of Sister Miriam. It was written specifically for, and first published within, The People's Hymnal in 1867. The editors of that collection inserted it as entry Number 218, designating it specifically as a hymn for the "Common for Priests."