“CHRISTIANS, IF YOUR HEARTS ARE WARM.”
Elder John Leland, born in Grafton, Mass., 1754, was not only a strenuous personality in the Baptist 321 / 275 denomination, but was well known everywhere in New England, and, in fact, his preaching trip to Washington (1801) with the “Cheshire Cheese” made his fame national. He is spoken of as “the minister who wrote his own hymns”—a peculiarity in which he imitated Watts and Doddridge. When some natural shrinking was manifest in converts of his winter revivals, under his rigid rule of immediate baptism, he wrote this hymn to fortify them:
Christians, if your hearts are warm,
Ice and cold can do no harm;
If by Jesus you are prized
Rise, believe and be baptized.
He found use for the hymn, too, in rallying church-members who staid away from his meetings in bad weather. The “poetry” expressed what he wanted to say—which, in his view, was sufficient apology for it. It was sung in revival meetings like others that he wrote, and a few hymnbooks now long obsolete contained it; but of Leland's hymns only one survives. Gray-headed men and women remember being sung to sleep by their mothers with that old-fashioned evening song to Amzi Chapin's* tune—
The day is past and gone,
The evening shades appear,
O may we all remember well
The night of death draws near;
—and with all its solemnity and other-worldness it is dear to recollection, and its five stanzas are lovingly hunted up in the few hymnals where it is found. Bradbury's “Braden,” (Baptist Praise Book, 1873,) is one of its tunes.
* Amzi Chapin has left, apparently, nothing more than the record of his birth, March 2, 1768, and the memory of his tune. It appeared as early as 1805.
Elder Leland was a remarkable revival preacher, and his prayers—as was said of Elder Jabez Swan's fifty or sixty years later—“brought heaven and earth together.” He traveled through the Eastern States as an evangelist, and spent a season in Virginia in the same work. In 1801 he revisited that region on a curious errand. The farmers of Cheshire, Mass., where Leland was then a settled pastor, conceived the plan of sending “the biggest cheese in America” to President Jefferson, and Leland (who was a good democrat) offered to go to Washington on an ox-team with it, and “preach all the way”—which he actually did.
The cheese weighed 1450 lbs.
Elder Leland died in North Adams, Mass., Jan. 14, 1844. Another of his hymns, which deserved to live with his “Evening Song,” seemed to be answered in the brightness of his death-bed hope:
O when shall I see Jesus
And reign with Him above,
And from that flowing fountain
Drink everlasting love?