Tell me the old, old story
Of unseen things above,
Of Jesus and His glory,
Of Jesus and His love.
Tell me the story simply,
As to a little child,
For I am weak and weary,
And helpless and defiled.
Tell me the old, old story,
Tell me the old, old story,
Tell me the old, old story
Of Jesus and His love.
Tell me the story slowly,
That I may take it in—
That wonderful redemption,
God's remedy for sin.
Tell me the story often,
For I forget so soon;
The early dew of morning
Has passed away at noon.
Tell me the story softly,
With earnest tones and grave;
Remember I’m the sinner
Whom Jesus came to save.
Tell me the story always,
If you would really be,
In any time of trouble,
A comforter to me.
Public domain hymn text (published 1866). Words by Katherine Hankey.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Katherine Hankey was an English woman from a prosperous banking family who became deeply involved in Sunday school teaching and Bible study work among factory workers and young working-class women in London, and later did similar mission work in South Africa, at a time when few women of her social class held any recognized public teaching role within the church.
In 1866, during a lengthy and serious illness that left her bedridden for many months, Hankey occupied her forced confinement by composing a long narrative poem retelling the life of Christ, eventually dividing the finished work into two distinct parts, each addressing the gospel story from a different angle.
The first part, titled 'The Story Wanted,' provided the basis for this hymn, written from the perspective of a listener actively requesting that the familiar gospel story be told again, simply and without theological embellishment, 'as to a little child' — language reflecting Hankey's own experience teaching basic Bible content to working-class students with little formal education, for whom plain, repeated retelling mattered more than doctrinal sophistication.
The second part of her long poem, titled 'The Story Told,' later became the separate basis for a companion hymn, 'I Love to Tell the Story' (hymn 67 in this collection), written from the opposite perspective of someone who has already heard the story and now feels compelled to keep retelling it to others in turn.
Both hymns emerged from the very same season of illness and the very same long convalescent poem, yet went on to take entirely independent lives, set to different tunes by different composers and published separately, decades apart in some hymnals. Together, though, they capture the fuller circle Hankey seems to have wanted to describe from her sickbed: the ongoing, self-renewing cycle of hearing the gospel and then telling it again to someone else, repeated endlessly across generations of believers she would never personally meet.
