Give me to feel their solemn weight,
And tremble on the brink of fate,
And wake to righteousness.
The preachers and poets of the great spiritual movement of the eighteenth century in England abated nothing in the candor of their words. The terrible earnestness of conviction tipped their tongues and pens with fire.
THE TUNE.
Lady Huntingdon would have lent “Meribah” gladly to this hymn, but Mason was not yet born. Many times it has been borrowed for Wesley's words since it came to its own, and the spirit of the pious Countess has doubtless approved the loan. It is rich enough to furnish forth her own lyric and more than one other of like matter and metre.
The muscular music of “Ganges” has sometimes carried the hymn, and there are those who think its thunder is not a whit more Hebraic than the words require.
“COME YE SINNERS POOR AND NEEDY.”
Few hymns have been more frequently sung in prayer-meetings and religious assemblies during the last hundred and fifty years. Its author, Joseph Hart, spoke what he knew and testified what he felt. Born in London, 1712, and liberally educated, he was in his young manhood very religious, but he went so far astray as to indulge in evil practices, and 150 / 120 even published writings, both original and translated, against Christianity and religion of any kind. But he could not drink at the Dead Sea and live. The apples of Sodom sickened him. Conscience asserted itself, and the pangs of remorse nearly drove him to despair till he turned back to the source he had forsaken. He alludes to this experience in the lines—
Let not conscience make you linger,