At one evening service in Stanberry, Mo., the singing of the hymn by the leader of the choir led 508 / 448 to the conversion of one boy who was present, and whose parents were that night praying for him in an eastern state, and inspired such earnest prayer in the hearts of two other runaway boys' parents that the same answer followed.
There would not be room in a dozen pages to record all the similar saving incidents connected with the singing of “Where Is My Wandering Boy?” The rhetoric of love is strong in every note and syllable of the solo, and the tender chorus of voices swells the song to heaven like an antiphonal prayer.
Strange to say, Dr. Lowry set lightly by his hymns and tunes, and deprecated much mention of them though he could not deny their success. An active Christian since seventeen years of age, through his early pulpit service, his six years' professorship, and the long pastorate in Plainfield, N.J., closed by his death, he considered preaching to be his supreme function as it certainly was his first love. Music was to him “a side-issue,” an “efflorescence,” and writing a hymn ranked far below making and delivering a sermon. “I felt a sort of meanness when I began to be known as a composer,” he said. And yet he was the author of a hymn and tune which “has done more to bring back wandering boys than any other” ever written.*
* “Where Is My Boy Tonight” was composed for a book of temperance hymns, The Fountain of Song, 1877.
“ETERNITY.”
This is the title and refrain of both Mrs. Ellen M.H. Gates' impressive poem and its tune.
O the clanging bells of Time!
Night and day they never cease;
We are weaned with their chime,