“TIS RELIGION THAT CAN GIVE.”
This simple rhyme, which has been sung perhaps in every Sunday-school in England and the United States, is from a small English book by Mary Masters. In the preface to the work, we read, “The author of the following poems never read a treatise of rhetoric or an art of poetry, nor was ever taught her English grammar. Her education rose no higher than the spelling-book or her writing-master,”
'Tis religion that can give
Sweetest pleasure while we live;
'Tis religion can supply
Solid comfort when we die.
After death its joys shall be
Lasting as eternity.
Save the two sentences about herself, quoted above, there is no biography of the writer. That she was good is taken for granted.
The tune-sister of the little hymn is as scant of date or history as itself. No. 422 points it out in The Revivalist, where the name and initial seem to ascribe the authorship to Horace Waters.*
* From his Sabbath Bell. Horace Waters, a prominent Baptist layman, was born in Jefferson, Lincoln Co., Me., Nov. 1, 1812, and died in New York City, April 22, 1893. He was a piano-dealer and publisher.