A popular missionary hymn based on Luke 10:2: “The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few: pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he would send forth laborers into his harvest.”
No information has been found concerning the author, J. O. Thompson, or the composer of the tune, J. B. O. Clemm. The song appeared in The Epworth Hymnal, edited by John H. Vincent, afterward a Bishop, and published by Phillips and Hunt, Methodist Publishers, New York, in 1885. It was copyrighted by them as of that year.
326. Father, whose will is life and good
Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley, 1851-1920
A prayer for the sick, and for physicians engaged in medical missionary work.
The hymn first appeared in A Missionary Hymn Book, 1922, published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, in London. The author, Rev. Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley, was an influential minister and educator in the Church of England. He spent much of his life in the Lake District in northern England, and, being a man of public spirit and a lover of nature, he championed the rights of the people in securing for public use in perpetuity many beautiful tracts of the Lake District and other parts of the country. His friends remembered him as one “who, greatly loving the fair things of nature and of art, set all his love to the service of God and man.”
MUSIC. “TALLIS,” says William H. Havergal in Notes on Certain Tunes, is “simplicity itself. A child may sing the tune, while manly genius will admire it.”
For comments on the composer, Thomas Tallis, see [Hymn 33].
327. Christ for the world we sing
Samuel Wolcott, 1813-86