209. Walk in the light! so shalt thou know
Bernard Barton, 1784-1849
A useful hymn, by a Quaker poet, setting forth the characteristic Quaker doctrine of the “Inner Light,” based on I John 1:7: “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.”
The hymn appeared in the author’s Devotional Verses, London, 1826.
Bernard Barton, known in England as the “Quaker Poet” (as was Whittier in America), was born in London and educated at a Quaker school at Ipswich. When 26 years old he became a Clerk in Alexander’s Bank at Woodbridge, Suffolk, and stayed there the remainder of his life. On Nov. 16, 1843, he wrote in a letter:
I took my seat on the identical stool I now occupy at the desk to the wood of which I have now well-nigh grown, in the third month of the year 1810, and there I have sat for three and thirty years beside the odd eight months without one month’s respite in all that time. I often wonder that my health has stood this sedentary probation as it has and that my mental facilities have survived three and thirty years of putting down figures in three rows, casting them up and carrying them forward, ad infinitum.
He might have given some of these years to literary pursuits had he not followed the good advice of Charles Lamb who wrote him:
Throw yourself on the world, without any rational plan of support beyond what the chance employ of booksellers would afford you! Throw yourself rather, my dear sir, from the steep Tarpeian rock, slap-dash headlong upon iron spikes. If you have but five consolatory minutes between the desk and the bed, make much of them, and live a century in them, rather than turn slave to the booksellers. They are Turks and Tartars when they have poor authors at their beck. Hitherto you have been at arm’s length from them—come not within their grasp. I have known many authors’ want for bread—some repining, others enjoying the blessed security of a counting-house—all agreeing they had rather have been tailors, weavers, what not? rather than the things they were. I have known some starved, some go mad, one dear friend literally dying in a workhouse. Oh, you know not—may you never know—the miseries of subsisting by authorship!
He published eight or ten volumes of verse. His writings show an extensive acquaintance with the Scriptures.
MUSIC. DEDHAM. For comments on the composer, William Gardiner, see [Hymn 197].