Singing Amid Suffering
“She truly learned in suffering what she taught in song,” someone remarked concerning the author of the hymn:
“There is no sorrow, Lord, too light
To bring in prayer to Thee;
There is no anxious care too slight
To wake Thy sympathy.”
The Rev. J. H. Jowett, D.D., the great expository preacher who left his Birmingham pastorate in England to serve the Fifth Avenue pastorate in New York City during the second decade of the twentieth century, made this his favorite hymn. Few knew hymns, especially of a devotional nature, better than he.
This hymn came from the pen and heart of Jane Fox Crewdson. Cornwall was her birthplace, 1809; but after her marriage to a merchant of Manchester at the age of 27, she lived her life in that city until her death in 1863. Many years of her life were spent in the sick room. Gifted with poetic talent, she wrote many poems and hymns. Most of these were “composed amid paroxysms of pain.”
Most appropriately did a Presbyterian minister in an American city, where he had served for 24 years, select this hymn for Memorial Day Sunday in 1947. At the entrance to the building a member of the church had placed a basket of lovely flowers before the bronze tablet which recorded the names of men who had served in the World Wars. Comforting must have been the words of Mrs. Crewdson’s hymn to those who had suffered the loss of those dear to them in the war period:
“Thou, who hast trod the thorny road,
Wilt share each small distress;
The love which bore the greater load,
Will not refuse the less.”
Not simply in the land where the author lived and wrote are her hymns found, but this one also appears in The Hymnal (Presbyterian) in the United States and The Hymnary of The United Church of Canada. Dr. James Moffatt quotes from an unnamed author this testimony relating to the writer: “As a constant sufferer, the spiritual life deepening, and the intellectual life retaining all its power, she became well prepared to testify to the all-sufficiency of her Saviour’s love.” Hence we can appreciate what has been said concerning the third verse, namely, “There is infinite pathos packed into these lines:
“‘There is no secret sigh we breathe,
But meets Thine ear divine;
And every cross grows light beneath
The shadow, Lord, of Thine.’”