For time flies apace, and eternity’s nigh!
My soul starts with wonder, to think how God’s thunder,
Will shake all creation at Gabriel’s call!
When time is no longer, the aged and younger,
Before the great Judge, in their trouble, will fall.
The Judgment decided, friends now are divided;
And all the ungodly are turned into hell:
But glory to Jesus! believing, He’ll save us,
With angels in glory his praises to swell.
The Olive Leaf arranger spoiled the tune’s apparent mixolydian purity by changing the d’s to d-sharps. As to title and source the editor says: “Reverend James Axley was one of the pioneer preachers of the Holston Conference, and a very holy, laborious, and successful minister. I learned this tune and song of Reverend Russell Reneau, who died in Arkansas during our late unhappy Civil War. Crude as the song is, I choose to preserve it in memory of Mr. Axley and Mr. Reneau.” The tune is a variant of ‘Christian Warfare’, GOS 603. Further information as to the Reverend James Axley, whose period of activity in the methodist conferences of Tennessee, Kentucky and other states was during the first decades of the nineteenth century, may be found in Peter Cartwright’s Autobiography, p. 62 and elsewhere.