“SWEET THE MOMENTS, RICH IN BLESSING.”
The Hon. and Rev. [Walter Shirley], Rector of Loughgree, county of Galway, Ireland, revised this hymn under the chastening discipline of a most trying experience. His brother, the Earl of Ferrars, a licentious man, murdered an old and faithful servant in a fit of rage, and was executed at Tyburn for the crime. Sir Walter, after the 160 / 128 disgrace and long distress of the imprisonment, trial, and final tragedy, returned to his little parish in Ireland, humbled but driven nearer to the Cross.
Sweet the moments, rich in blessing
Which before the Cross I spend;
Life and health and peace possessing
From the sinner's dying Friend.
All the emotion of one who buries a mortifying sorrow in the heart of Christ, and tries to forget, trembles in the lines of the above hymn as he changed and adapted it in his saddest but devoutest hours. Its original writer was the Rev. James Allen, nearly twenty years younger than himself, a man of culture and piety, but a Christian of shifting creeds. It is not impossible that he sent his hymn to Shirley to revise. At all events it owes its present form to Shirley's hand.
Truly blesséd is the station
Low before His cross to lie,
While I see Divine Compassion
Beaming in His gracious eye.*
* “Floating in His languid eye” seems to have been the earlier version.
The influence of Sir Walter's family misfortune is evident also in the mood out of which breathed his other trustful lines—
Peace, troubled soul, whose plaintive moan
Hath taught these rocks the notes of woe,
(changed now to “hath taught these scenes” etc).
Sir Walter Shirley, cousin of the Countess of Huntingdon, was born 1725, and died in 1786. 161 / 129 Even in his last sickness he continued to preach to his people in his house, seated in his chair.
Rev. James Oswald Allen was born at Gayle, Yorkshire, Eng., June 24, 1743. He left the University of Cambridge after a year's study, and became an itinerant preacher, but seems to have been a man of unstable religious views. After roving from one Christian denomination to another several times, he built a Chapel, and for forty years ministered there to a small Independent congregation. He died in Gayle, Oct. 31, 1804.
The tune long and happily associated with “Sweet the Moments” is “Sicily,” or the “Sicilian Hymn”—from an old Latin hymn-tune, “O Sanctissima.”