Heber and His Hymn
‘“P^HEEE have beea men who have won an honorable immortahty in an hour. A brave word fitly spoken, or a noble deed promptly done, has given them a place on the bead-roll of fame for ever. Sometimes in a happy moment of inspiration a poet or an orator has “said or sung ‘” what will last for ages.
One of these happy songsters, whose grandest strain was born in an hour, but which the world shall never willingly let die, was Eegi-NALD Heber, Bishop of Christ’s flock in Calcutta. If the great mass of Christians around the globe were asked to name the two English bishops whose memory is most dear to them, they would probably name Jeremy Taylor and Reginald Heber. Yet the veneration and gratitude felt towards the latter is mainly founded upon a few lines which he threw off in a sudden inspiration, and which could be written on a single page.
Reginald Heber was born at Malpas, in Cheshire, on the 21st of April, 1783. He was a precocious boy, and at seven years of age he had translated Phaedrus into English verse. His prize poem at Oxford University on “Palestine,” written in his twentieth year, stands at the head of that class of somewhat ephemeral productions. His “Palestine” will live, and so will his tender and graceful lines to his wife at Bombay, and so will his nautical hymn, “When through the torn sail the tempest is streaming.” But all his poetry, and his Bampton lectures, and his able Quarterly Review articles, are weighed down by his single matchless missionary hymn. Its composition was on this wise.
While Reginald Heber was rector of the Episcopal Church at Hodnet, in Shropshire, he went to pay a visit to his father-in-law. Dr. Shipley, then Vicar of Wrexham, on the border of Wales. Heber was in his thirty-sixth.
29y THOUGHT-HIVES.
year,^nd had come to Wrexham to deliver the first of a series of Sunday evening lectures in Dr. Shipley’s church. In the morning of that same day, Dr. Shipley was to deliver a discourse in behalf of the “Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.”
On the afternoon before “Whit-Sunday” (1819), Heber and his father-in-law sat chatting with a few friends in Dr. Shipley’s parlor. Dr. Shipley, knowing his son-in-law’s happy gift in rapid composition, said to him, “Write something for us to sing at the service to-morrow morning.” Short notice that, for a man to achieve his immortality. Heber retired to another part of the room, g,nd in a little time had prepared three verses, of which the first one ran thus: —
“From Greenland’s icy mountains;
From I idia’s coral strand,
Where Afric’s sunny fountains
Roll down their golden sand;
From many an ancient river;
From many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver
Their land from error’s chain.”
Heber read the three verses over, and only altered a single word. The seventh line of the second verse vias —
“The savage in his blindness.”
The author erased that word, and substituted for it the better word heathen. “There, there,” coolly remarked Dr. Shipley, “that will do very well.” Heber was not satisfied, and said, “No, no: the sense is not complete.” In spite of his father’s earnest protest, Heber withdrew for a few moments longer, and then coiaing back read the following glorious bugle blast which rings like the reveille of the millennial morning: —
“Waft, waft, ye winds, the story,
And you, ye waters, roll!
Till, like a sea of glory.
It spreads from pole to pole!
Till o’er our ransomed nature.
The Lamb for sinners slain.
Redeemer, King, Creator,
In bUss returns to reign.”
“What shall we sing it to 1” inquired Dr. Shipley. Mi’i IJeber, who hai fine musical ear, suggested a popular air called “‘Twas when the seas were roaring.” The suggestion was adopted, and on the next morning the people of Wrexham church listened to the “first rehearsal” of a lyric which has since been echoed by millions of voices around the globe. The air to which it was sung originally has given place, at least in oui- American churches, to a sonorous and lofty tune composed by Dr. Lowell Mason. The air is worthy of the hymn, and both are perfect. No profane hymn-tinker ever dared to lay his bungling finger on a single syllable of those four stanzas which the Holy Spirit moved Reginald Heber to write. Little did the young rector of Hodnet dream, as he listened to the lines sung that Sabbath morning, that he was catching the first strains of his own immoi’- tality. He “builded better than he knew.” He did more to waft the story of Calvary around the earth than if he had preached like Apollos, or had founded a board of missions. In the “monthly concerts,” held in New England school-houses, in frontier cabins, on the decks of missionary ships bound to “Ceylon’s Isle,” and in the vast assemblies of the American Board, Heber’s trumpet-hymn has been sung with swelling voices and gushing tears. It is the marching music to which Christ’s hosts “keep step” as they advance to the conquest of the globe.
Heber lived but seven years after the composition of his masterpiece. In June, 1823, he departed for Calcutta as the missionary Bishop of India. For three years he toiled and travelled incessantly, and wherever he went his apostolic sweetness of character and benignity won even the “heathen in their blindness.” After a laborious day’s work at Trichinopoly, he went to his bath to refresh his weary frame. He remained,, in the bath-room until his attendants became alarmed, and when they came in they found Reginald Heber asleep in Jesus. His gentle spirit had stolen away to join in the “song of Moses and of the Lamb.”