At a Palo Alto Sacred Harp singing last month, someone called #548, Ainslie, a contemplation on death, with the first two verses:
1 The time is swiftly rolling on
When I must faint and die;
My body to the dust return,
And there forgotten lie.2 Let persecution rage around,
And Antichrist appear;
My silent dust beneath the ground;
There’s no disturbance there.
Several singers were startled to see Antichrist in the text. Now, there is a vein of Sacred Harp songs with hallucinatory text from the book of Revelation, but this text is nothing like that, so it was something of a puzzle.
But… there is a resource, the excellent Sacred Harp Concordance (1992, keyed to the 1991 edition of the book). There, we discovered not one, but three, songs with Antichrist in them. Well, three settings of the very same text (with the first two verses above), in which nothing whatsoever, not even the appearance of the Antichrist at the End of Times, will disturb the silence of the singer’s remains.
