COURAGE AND COMFORT
240. Come unto Me, ye weary
William C. Dix, 1837-98
Based on some of the precious promises of Christ, especially Matt. 11:28: “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden and I will give you rest.” It may be compared with Bonar’s hymn, “I heard the voice of Jesus say” ([142]) on the same text.
The author gives the story of the hymn as follows:
I was ill and depressed at the time, and it was almost to idle away the hours that I wrote the hymn. I had been ill for many weeks, and felt weary and faint, and the hymn really expresses the languidness of body from which I was suffering at the time. Soon after its composition I recovered, and I always look back to that hymn as the turning point in my illness.
For comments on the author, William Chatterdon Dix, see [Hymn 78].
MUSIC. ICH WEISS AN WEN ICH GLAUBE is taken from the Gesangbuch mit Noten ([206]) where it is used with a hymn by Ernst Moritz Arndt, beginning with these words.
241. When in the madd’ning maze of things
John Greenleaf Whittier, 1807-92