The group of young Welshmen who sang in Oxford that day, while some Americans were among the listeners, showed a courageous spirit, a love of hymns, and a devotional attitude. Doubtless their song was a prayer of the heart:
“Guide me, O Thou Great Jehovah.”
Singing Amid Suffering
“She truly learned in suffering what she taught in song,” someone remarked concerning the author of the hymn:
“There is no sorrow, Lord, too light
To bring in prayer to Thee;
There is no anxious care too slight
To wake Thy sympathy.”
The Rev. J. H. Jowett, D.D., the great expository preacher who left his Birmingham pastorate in England to serve the Fifth Avenue pastorate in New York City during the second decade of the twentieth century, made this his favorite hymn. Few knew hymns, especially of a devotional nature, better than he.
This hymn came from the pen and heart of Jane Fox Crewdson. Cornwall was her birthplace, 1809; but after her marriage to a merchant of Manchester at the age of 27, she lived her life in that city until her death in 1863. Many years of her life were spent in the sick room. Gifted with poetic talent, she wrote many poems and hymns. Most of these were “composed amid paroxysms of pain.”