From lips of gentleness and grace
When listening thousands gathered round,
And joy and gladness filled the place,
—and the more famous hymn indicated at the head of this sketch. Knowledge of all religions only qualified him to worship the Crucified with both faith and reason. Though nominally a Unitarian, to him, as to Channing and Martineau and Edmund Sears, Christ was “all we know of God.”
* Exaggerated in some accounts to forty.
Bowring died Nov. 23, 1872. But his hymn to the Cross will never die:
In the cross of Christ I glory,
Towering o'er the wrecks of time;
All the light of sacred story