There's a wideness in God's mercy,
Like the wideness of the sea;
There's a kindness in His justice,
Which is more than liberty.
For the love of God is broader
Than the measure of man's mind;
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind.
There is plentiful redemption
In the blood that has been shed;
There is joy for all the members
In the sorrows of the Head.
Note: the later verse(s) below have been reconstructed from historical memory and may not be word-for-word identical to the original published text.
Public domain hymn text (published 1854). Words by Frederick W. Faber.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Frederick William Faber was an English clergyman who began his ministry within the Church of England as a fairly conventional parish priest, but who later, in November 1845, followed the prominent Oxford theologian John Henry Newman — already discussed elsewhere in this collection as the author of 'Lead, Kindly Light' (hymn 99) — into formal conversion to Roman Catholicism, doing so only a few weeks after Newman's own considerably more publicly noted conversion, during a period of genuinely significant religious upheaval, public controversy, and often bitter personal cost known collectively as the Oxford Movement, which saw a number of prominent English clergy leave the established church for Rome within a fairly short span of years.
Faber went on to write a large number of hymns after his own conversion, entering a religious order and eventually founding the London Oratory, many of his hymns notably emphasizing God's mercy and love in strikingly expansive, almost deliberately boundless terms that some contemporaries considered unusually generous even by the standards of Victorian devotional writing, and this particular hymn is widely considered one of his single best-known and most enduring works, built entirely around the sustained, deliberately extended image of a divine mercy so genuinely wide that it exceeds even the visible width of the entire ocean — 'there's a wideness in God's mercy, like the wideness of the sea.'
Faber originally composed the hymn's full text considerably longer than the version commonly sung today, and several of the deleted or rarely sung original stanzas contained direct theological argument specifically pushing back against what Faber viewed as an unduly narrow, restrictive Calvinist conception of divine election then common in some Protestant circles, suggesting the hymn was originally intended partly as gentle doctrinal correction as well as straightforward devotional comfort.
Although written originally by a convert Catholic priest specifically for use within his own adopted tradition, the hymn was nonetheless quickly and enthusiastically adopted by Protestant congregations across England and America as well, its central message of genuinely expansive, boundary-crossing divine grace resonating widely across denominational lines in a manner that, somewhat ironically, transcended the very same specific controversies over church authority and doctrine that had originally driven its own author out of the Church of England and into Rome in the first place.
