He leadeth me: O blessed thought!
O words with heavenly comfort fraught!
Whate’er I do, where’er I be,
Still ’tis God’s hand that leadeth me.
He leadeth me, He leadeth me,
By His own hand He leadeth me;
His faithful follower I would be,
For by His hand He leadeth me.
Sometimes ‘mid scenes of deepest gloom,
Sometimes where Eden’s bowers bloom,
By waters still, over troubled sea,
Still ’tis His hand that leadeth me.
Lord, I would place my hand in Thine,
Nor ever murmur nor repine;
Content, whatever lot I see,
Since ’tis my God that leadeth me.
Public domain hymn text (published 1862). Words by Joseph H. Gilmore.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Joseph H. Gilmore, a Baptist minister who later became a professor of Hebrew and biblical literature, wrote this hymn's text in 1862 almost entirely by accident, composing it immediately after preaching a Wednesday evening sermon specifically on Psalm 23 — focusing particularly on its central image of the Lord leading His people 'beside the still waters' — to a small congregation in Philadelphia during a period when Gilmore was still relatively early in his own pastoral career. He later recalled simply jotting the resulting handful of lines down on a loose scrap of paper immediately after the service concluded, handing the paper to his wife without much further comment, and giving the matter essentially no further thought at all for the following three years.
Completely without his own knowledge or involvement, his wife eventually and independently submitted the forgotten text to William B. Bradbury, a prominent Boston-based hymn tune composer and music publisher already well established in the industry, who set the words to an original tune and had the resulting hymn printed for wider circulation. Gilmore reportedly did not personally learn that his own long-forgotten scrap-paper poem had, in the intervening years, quietly become a published and increasingly widely circulated hymn until he happened to encounter a printed copy of it himself, entirely by chance, sometime considerably later.
Gilmore went on to serve for many years as a professor and eventually as president of a college in New Hampshire, building a respected academic career largely separate from his brief early experience of hymn writing, and he sometimes pointed afterward, in his own later reflections, to the hymn's own genuinely unplanned and almost entirely accidental path to eventual publication as a fitting real-life illustration of its own central theological theme — namely, that meaningful guidance and direction in a person's life often unfold quietly in the background, independent of, and sometimes even directly despite, that same person's own conscious intentions or immediate awareness of what is happening.
