On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,
The emblem of suffering and shame;
And I love that old cross, where the dearest and best
For a world of lost sinners was slain.
So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross,
Till my trophies at last I lay down;
I will cling to the old rugged cross,
And exchange it some day for a crown.
Oh, that old rugged cross, so despised by the world,
Has a wondrous attraction for me;
For the dear Lamb of God left His glory above
To bear it to dark Calvary.
In that old rugged cross, stained with blood so divine,
A wondrous beauty I see,
For ’twas on that old cross Jesus suffered and died,
To pardon and sanctify me.
To the old rugged cross I will ever be true,
Its shame and reproach gladly bear;
Then He’ll call me some day to my home far away,
Where His glory forever I’ll share.
Public domain hymn text (published 1913). Words by George Bennard.
The Story Behind the Hymn
George Bennard, an evangelist closely associated first with the Methodist Episcopal Church and later with the Salvation Army, wrote this hymn's complete text and accompanying tune together in 1912, reportedly finishing the words only after passing through a genuinely significant period of personal spiritual struggle while deliberately reflecting at length on the full theological meaning of Christ's crucifixion, doing so specifically in preparation for an upcoming series of revival meetings he had already scheduled in Michigan.
The completed hymn was first sung publicly in January 1913 at a revival service held in New York, and its central, sustained image of the cross functioning simultaneously as both an 'emblem of suffering and shame' and yet also, at the very same time, something supremely and unreservedly cherished by the individual believer captures a paradox that has remained genuinely central to Christian theological reflection on the crucifixion across many centuries — an ordinary instrument of brutal Roman capital execution gradually transformed, entirely through its specific historical association with Christ's own death, into the single primary object of ongoing Christian devotion, worship, and hope.
The hymn quickly became, within only a few years of its first performance, one of the single most widely sung individual hymns anywhere across the whole of twentieth-century American Protestantism, particularly and especially within revival and outdoor camp-meeting settings of exactly the kind Bennard himself specialized in leading, and Bennard himself reportedly continued actively preaching and personally leading revival meetings well into his own eighties, many decades after first writing the single hymn for which he would ultimately remain best known and most widely remembered for the entire remainder of his unusually long working life.
