My Jesus, I love Thee, I know Thou art mine;
For Thee all the follies of sin I resign;
My gracious Redeemer, my Savior art Thou;
If ever I loved Thee, my Jesus, ’tis now.
I love Thee because Thou hast first loved me,
And purchased my pardon on Calvary’s tree;
I love Thee for wearing the thorns on Thy brow;
If ever I loved Thee, my Jesus, ’tis now.
I’ll love Thee in life, I will love Thee in death,
And praise Thee as long as Thou lendest me breath;
And say when the death dew lies cold on my brow,
If ever I loved Thee, my Jesus, ’tis now.
Public domain hymn text (published 1864). Words by William Ralph Featherston.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Remarkably little verified biographical detail survives about William Ralph Featherston's brief life; nearly everything historians and hymnologists currently know comes from only a small handful of surviving family letters and local church records preserved in Montreal, Canada, where he lived his entire short life. He is generally believed, based on this limited surviving evidence, to have written this hymn's text as a teenager, at around sixteen years of age, and to have died relatively young, still in his twenties, very likely without ever personally learning that his own youthful private poem had gone on to become a widely sung and enduringly popular hymn across the English-speaking Christian world.
According to surviving family tradition passed down within the Featherston family, the young William sent a handwritten manuscript copy of his poem to a relative living considerably further away, in Los Angeles, and the poem was reportedly only formally published in print years later, well after his own early death, meaning Featherston himself almost certainly never once saw his own words set in print or heard them sung aloud together in an actual church congregation during his own comparatively brief lifetime.
The tune most commonly paired with the text today was composed entirely separately, with no direct personal connection whatsoever to the poem's own young author, by Adoniram Judson Gordon, an American Baptist minister and hymn tune composer who set Featherston's already-existing words to music without any documented personal knowledge of or connection to the young Canadian writer, whose own brief life had already ended well before the hymn eventually found its now-familiar and lasting musical form under Gordon's separate authorship.
That a poem so entirely private in its original intended audience — written by a teenager, sent quietly to a single distant relative, and apparently never intended for any wider readership at all — eventually became, through a musical setting composed by someone who never knew its author, one of the most tender and widely beloved personal devotional hymns still regularly sung in churches today stands as one of the more genuinely poignant and improbable origin stories found anywhere within this entire hymnal.
