When my Lord comes I trust I shall
—through all the loving rotations of the crude hymn-tune. Such song-births of spiritual enthusiasm are beyond enumeration—and it is useless to hunt for author or composer. Under the momentum of a wrestling hour or a common rapture of experience, counterpoint was unthought of, and the same notes for every voice lifted pleading and praise in monophonic impromptu. The refrains—
O how I love Jesus,
O the Lamb, the Lamb, the loving Lamb,
I'm going home to die no more,
Pilgrims we are to Canaan's land,
O turn ye, O turn ye, for why will you die,
Come to Jesus, come to Jesus, just now,
—each at the sound of its first syllable brought its own music to every singer's tongue, and all—male and female—were sopranos together. This habit in singing those rude liturgies of faith and fellowship was recognized by the editors of the Revivalist, and to a multitude of them space was given only for the printed melody, and of this sometimes only the three or four initial bars. The tunes were the church's rural field-tones that everybody knew.
Culture smiles at this unclassic hymnody of long ago, but its history should disarm criticism. To wanderers its quaint music and “pedestrian” verse were threshold call and door-way welcome into the church of the living God. Even in the flaming days of the Second Advent following, in 1842–3, they awoke in many hardened hearts the spiritual glow that never dies. The delusion passed away, but the grace remained.
The church—and the world—owe a long debt to the old evangelistic refrains that rang through the sixty years before the Civil War, some of them flavored with tuneful piety of a remoter time. They preached righteousness, and won souls that sermons could not reach. They opened heaven to thousands who are now rejoicing there.