When sorrows like sea-billows roll—
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
“It is well, it is well with my soul.”
A friend of Spafford who knew his history read this hymn while repining under an inferior affliction of his own. “If he can feel like that after suffering what he has suffered,” he said, “I will cease my complaints.”
It may not have been the weight of Mr. Spafford's sorrows wearing him down, but one would infer some mental disturbance in the man seven or eight years later. “In 1881” [writes Mr. Hubert P. Main] “he went to Jerusalem under the hallucination that he was a second Messiah—and died there on the seventh anniversary of his landing in Palestine, Sept. 5, 1888.” The aberrations of an over-wrought mind are beckonings to God's compassion. When reason wanders He takes the soul of His helpless child into his own keeping—and “it is well.”
The tune to Spafford's hymn is by P.P. Bliss; a gentle, gliding melody that suits the mood of the words.
“WAITING AND WATCHING FOR ME.”
Written by Mrs. Marianne Farningham Hearn, born in Kent, Eng., Dec. 17, 1834. The hymn was first published in the fall of 1864 in the London Church World. Its unrhythmical first line—
When mysterious whispers are floating about,
—was replaced by the one now familiar—