"Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken", also called "Zion, or the City of God",[1] is an 18th-century English hymn written by John Newton, who also wrote the hymn "Amazing Grace". Shape note composer Alexander Johnson set it to his tune "Jefferson" in 1818,[2] and as such it has remained in shape note collections such as the Sacred Harp ever since.[3] However, the hymn is most often set to the tune of Joseph Haydn's "Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser" (referred to in hymnals as "Austria").[i][4] In recent decades it has been sometimes replaced by "Abbot's Leigh". This was written for this text by The Reverend Cyril Vincent Taylor in 1942 while he was a producer of Religious Broadcasting at the BBC and stationed at the village of Abbots Leigh. Multiple other tunes have also been used with the hymn.
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