60. Send the Light

The Story Behind the Hymn

Charles H. Gabriel was one of the most prolific and commercially successful gospel-song composers actively working during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, credited over the course of his long career with personally writing or musically arranging thousands of individual hymns, including composing original tunes for texts written by numerous other hymn writers also represented elsewhere throughout this collection, among them Rufus McDaniel's 'Since Jesus Came Into My Heart' (hymn 87).

This particular hymn, however, has its specific origins in a single identifiable missionary occasion rather than in Gabriel's broader ongoing commercial hymn-writing work: it was written specifically for use at a Christian Endeavor missionary convention, Christian Endeavor being an influential interdenominational youth organization devoted specifically to engaging young people directly in practical Christian service and active support for expanding world missions, an organization that exercised considerable and widely documented influence across American Protestant church life generally at the turn of the twentieth century, with local chapters established in thousands of individual congregations nationwide.

The hymn's central, repeated governing image — urgently calling to 'send the light' out across 'the blue of the waves' specifically to reach 'the lost' waiting somewhere beyond — directly reflects the genuinely intense missionary enthusiasm and sense of global urgency characteristic of exactly this particular historical era, a period during which major American and European Protestant denominations were simultaneously and rapidly expanding their organized foreign mission efforts around the entire globe at a scale and pace not previously seen.

Congregational singing of hymns very much like this one was itself actively and deliberately used during this same period as a practical fundraising and volunteer-recruitment tool in direct service of that broader missionary movement, with mission societies and denominational boards regularly incorporating hymns of exactly this urgent, outward-looking, ocean-crossing character into missionary conventions, fundraising rallies, and youth recruitment events specifically designed to inspire both financial giving and personal volunteer commitment to overseas missionary service among the young people singing them.