John Athelstan Laurie Riley

John Athelstan Laurie Riley (1858–1945) was an English Anglican lay churchman, hymn writer, translator, liturgical scholar, and antiquary. Born in London on August 10, 1858, he was educated at Eton and Pembroke College, Oxford, taking his B.A. in 1881 and M.A. in 1883. He became active in the House of Laymen of the Province of Canterbury and in the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England, where his interests extended beyond hymnody to liturgy, ecclesiology, church art, and the history of Christian worship.

Riley traveled widely in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East and wrote about Eastern Christianity, including Athos, or the Mountain of the Monks, published in 1887. He also produced studies and reports concerning the Assyrian Christians and the Archbishop of Canterbury's mission to them. These interests gave him an unusually broad acquaintance with older Greek and Latin devotional traditions and with forms of worship outside the ordinary English parish setting.

He played an important part in The English Hymnal of 1906, serving among its compilers and contributing several translations from Latin and Greek as well as original hymns. His best-known original text is Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones, while his translations helped bring older Christian hymnody into modern English congregational use. Riley's significance lies in joining historical scholarship, liturgical renewal, and poetic craft during a formative period of twentieth-century Anglican hymnody.