William Paton Mackay

William Paton Mackay (1839–1885) was a Scottish Presbyterian minister, physician, hymn writer, and tune composer. Born at Montrose on May 13, 1839, he was educated at the University of Edinburgh and worked in medicine before entering the ministry. In 1868 he became minister of Prospect Street Presbyterian Church in Hull, England, a post that placed him within the evangelical and revival currents of nineteenth-century British Protestantism.

Mackay contributed substantially to William Reid's hymn collections. James Mearns, writing in John Julian's A Dictionary of Hymnology, recorded that seventeen of Mackay's hymns appeared in Reid's Praise Book of 1872. Hymnary also indexes a wider body of texts under his name, including "The Lord is risen; and death's dark judgment flood" and other hymns of praise, salvation, and Christian witness. The documentary evidence surrounding "Revive Us Again" is especially important for understanding Mackay's musical work: Reid's 1866 preface acknowledged Mackay as a contributor of tunes for his own texts, and the collection identified the melody used with this hymn as its own tune. Modern hymnological research therefore credits Mackay with the familiar revival tune as well as the words, correcting a long-standing attribution to John Jenkins Husband.

Mackay died at Portree, Scotland, on August 22, 1885, after an accident. His lasting place in hymnody rests chiefly on the way his writing joined evangelical proclamation with vigorous congregational song. "Revive Us Again" became his most widely circulated hymn, but his broader work shows a minister-musician participating directly in the nineteenth-century expansion of revival hymnody rather than functioning only as the author of a single famous text.