A couple years ago, I read John Eliot Gardiner's Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven and learned about the practice of inscribing musical crosses into works. Here's Gardiner's diagram of some crosses Bach inscribed in BWV 4: III:
Since learning about this, I've found quite a few of these cross inscriptions, and one of them is in the particular arrangement of "St. Crispin" in The Lutheran Service Book. The second musical phrase - melody and harmony - is:
When isolated, the harmony part in the last two bars has a cross inscription:
Not only is there a cross inscription, but it has relevance when considered with the text. For the first four verses of the hymn, the words that are sung to the melody above this cross inscription deal with the cross or the crucifixion: "His only Son the lost to save," "Who was made flesh and suffered death," "His Son with saving grace is nigh," and "Forgives all sins which you have done." God saves the lost through His Son's crucifixion; Christ "suffered death" on the cross; Christ's crucifixion is an illustration of God's "saving grace"; and it's through Christ's death on the cross that all our sins are forgiven.
