“PEOPLE OF THE LIVING GOD.”
Montgomery felt every line of this hymn as he committed it to paper. He wrote it when, after years in the “swim” of social excitements and ambitions, where his young independence swept him on, he came back to the little church of his boyhood. His father and mother had gone to the West Indies as missionaries, and died there. He was forty-three years old when, led by divine light, he sought readmission to the Moravian “meeting” at Fulneck, and anchored happily in a haven of peace.
People of the living God
I have sought the world around,
Paths of sin and sorrow trod,
Peace and comfort nowhere found:
Now to you my spirit turns—
Turns a fugitive unblest;
Brethren, where your altar burns,
Oh, receive me into rest.
James Montgomery, son of Rev. John Montgomery, was born at Irvine, Ayeshire, Scotland, 179 / 145 Nov. 4, 1771, and educated at the Moravian Seminary at Fulneck, Yorkshire, Eng. He became the editor of the Sheffield Iris, and his pen was busy in non-professional as well as professional work until old age. He died in Sheffield, April 30, 1854.
His literary career was singularly successful; and a glance through any complete edition of his poems will tell us why. His hymns were all published during his lifetime, and all, as well as his longer pieces, have the purity and polished beauty, if not the strength, of Addison's work. Like Addison, too, he could say that he had written no line which, dying, he would wish to blot.
The best of Montgomery was in his hymns. These were too many to enumerate here, and the more enduring ones too familiar to need enumeration. The church and the world will not soon forget “The Home in Heaven,”—
Forever with the Lord,
Amen, so let it be.
Life from the dead is in that word;
'Tis immortality.
Nor—
O where shall rest be found,
—with its impressive couplet—
'Tis not the whole of life to live
Nor all of death to die.
Nor the haunting sweetness of—
There is a calm for those who weep.
Nor, indeed, the hymn of Christian love just now before us.