“NEARER, MY GOD, TO THEE.”
Mr. William Stead, fond of noting what is often believed to be the “providential chain of 185 / 151 causes” in everything that happens, recalls the fact that Benjamin Flower, editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer, while in jail (1798) at the instigation of Bp. Watson for an article defending the French Revolution, and criticising the Bishop's political course, was visited by several sympathizing ladies, one of whom was Miss Eliza Gould. The young lady's first acquaintance with him there in his cell led to an attachment which eventuated in marriage. Of that marriage Sarah Flower was born. By the theory of providential sequences Mr. Stead makes it appear that the forgotten vindictiveness of a British prelate “was the causa causans of one of the most spiritual and aspiring hymns in the Christian Hymnary.”
“Nearer, My God, to Thee” was on the lips of President McKinley as he lay dying by a murderer's wicked shot. It is dear to President Roosevelt for its memories of the battle of Las Quasimas, where the Rough Riders sang it at the burial of their slain comrades. Bishop Marvin was saved by it from hopeless dejection, while practically an exile during the Civil War, by hearing it sung in the wilds of Arkansas, by an old woman in a log hut.
A letter from Pittsburg, Pa., to a leading Boston paper relates the name and experience of a forger who had left the latter city and wandered eight years a fugitive from justice. On the 5th of November, (Sunday,) 1905, he found himself in Pittsburg, and ventured into the Dixon Theatre, 186 / 152 where a religious service was being held, to hear the music. The hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee” so overcame him that he went out weeping bitterly. He walked the floor of his room all night, and in the morning telephoned for the police, confessed his name and crime, and surrendered himself to be taken back to the Boston authorities.
Mrs. Sarah Flower Adams, author of the noble hymn (supposed to have been written in 1840), was born at Harlow, Eng., Feb. 22, 1805, and died there in 1848. At her funeral another of her hymns was sung, ending—
When falls the shadow, cold in death
I yet will sing with fearless breath,
As comes to me in shade or sun,
“Father, Thy will, not mine, be done.”
The attempts to evangelize “Nearer, My God, to Thee” by those who cannot forget that Mrs. Adams was a Unitarian, are to be deplored. Such zeal is as needless as trying to sectarianize an Old Testament Psalm. The poem is a perfect religious piece—to be sung as it stands, with thanks that it was ever created.