My faith looks up to Thee,
Thou Lamb of Calvary,
Savior divine!
Now hear me while I pray,
Take all my guilt away,
O let me from this day
Be wholly Thine!
May Thy rich grace impart
Strength to my fainting heart,
My zeal inspire;
As Thou hast died for me,
O may my love to Thee
Pure, warm, and changeless be,
A living fire!
While life’s dark maze I tread,
And griefs around me spread,
Be Thou my Guide;
Bid darkness turn to day,
Wipe sorrow’s tears away,
Nor let me ever stray
From Thee aside.
When ends life’s transient dream,
When death’s cold, sullen stream
Shall o’er me roll;
Blest Savior, then, in love,
Fear and distrust remove;
O bear me safe above,
A ransomed soul!
Public domain hymn text (published 1830). Words by Ray Palmer.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Ray Palmer wrote this hymn's text in 1830 as a young schoolteacher living in New York City, only in his mid-twenties at the time and not yet formally ordained as a minister, during a period of his life he later described candidly, in his own retrospective writing, as one of considerable personal loneliness, financial hardship, and genuine ongoing spiritual searching, living far from his own family and still quite uncertain at that point about what his eventual life's calling and vocation might actually turn out to be.
He wrote the hymn's verses down in a small personal notebook he happened to be carrying at the time, not originally intending them for any kind of publication or public congregational use whatsoever — by his own later account of the moment, the words came to him almost involuntarily and unbidden, composed with genuine tears as he wrote, functioning as an entirely private, deliberately unpolished expression of his own deeply felt personal need for God during a genuinely difficult stretch of his young adult life, rather than as any kind of deliberate, carefully crafted literary composition intended for others to eventually read or sing.
The hymn might well have remained an entirely private document, tucked away permanently in Palmer's own personal notebook and never seen by another living soul, had he not, sometime later and quite by chance, happened to encounter the composer Lowell Mason — already responsible elsewhere in this collection for tunes including 'Nearer, My God, to Thee' (hymn 4) — who asked him in passing, as he apparently did of many acquaintances, whether Palmer happened to have any spare hymn texts lying around that might still be in need of a suitable musical setting.
Palmer showed him this one, by most accounts somewhat reluctantly, given its deeply personal and unpolished origins as private notebook writing rather than anything he had ever seriously considered publishing. Mason was reportedly struck powerfully enough by the text that he composed a complete matching melody for it within roughly half an hour of first reading it, and told Palmer directly and with apparent conviction that he suspected Palmer might ultimately be remembered by future generations more for these particular lines, dashed off in a private notebook during a lonely season of young adulthood, than for anything else of substance he might otherwise go on to accomplish across the rest of his career — a strikingly confident prediction made on the spot by a composer who had only just read the text for the first time, and one that, in the end, proved entirely accurate.
