4. Nearer, My God, to Thee

The Story Behind the Hymn

Sarah Flower Adams was an English poet and one-time professional actress, part of a literary and politically engaged family in nineteenth-century London; her father was a radical journalist and reformer, and she counted the poet Robert Browning among her circle of friends and correspondents. Though she and her husband were members of a Unitarian congregation in London, this hymn — her best-known work by far — has been embraced across a far wider range of Christian traditions than her own specific church background might suggest.

Adams wrote the hymn as a meditation on Jacob's dream at Bethel, recorded in Genesis 28:10-22, in which Jacob, fleeing alone and afraid after deceiving his brother, sees in a dream a stairway reaching from earth to heaven with angels ascending and descending upon it, and wakes to declare that God was present in that place even though he had not known it. Adams used that image of gradual, sometimes uncertain ascent — undertaken by someone in real personal distress, not triumphant confidence — as the hymn's controlling metaphor for the Christian's own uneven approach toward God.

She originally wrote the hymn for a London congregation whose minister, William Johnson Fox, had asked several members to contribute new hymns to accompany a planned sermon series working through the book of Genesis. The American composer and educator Lowell Mason, already responsible for the tune of 'Nearer, My God, to Thee' — and separately for the tune of 'Work, for the Night Is Coming' (hymn 63 in this collection) — set Adams's words to music soon afterward, and the hymn spread widely on both sides of the Atlantic within just a few decades of its writing.

Adams herself died relatively young, at 43, of tuberculosis, having written comparatively little else that achieved anything close to this hymn's lasting popularity. Its most enduring association, however, came seven decades after her death and had nothing directly to do with her: a widely circulated and historically disputed story holds that the ship's band aboard the RMS Titanic played this hymn as the vessel sank in the early hours of April 15, 1912, continuing to play even as the ship went down around them. Surviving accounts from that night differ on exactly what the band played in its final minutes, and the story may owe more to later memorial tradition than to verified fact — but it became fixed firmly enough in popular memory that the hymn has carried an association with quiet courage in the face of death ever since, sung at memorial services for tragedies far removed from the Unitarian sermon series it was originally written to accompany.