In the hour of trial,
Jesus, plead for me,
Lest by base denial
I depart from Thee;
When Thou seest me waver,
With a look recall,
Nor for fear or favor
Suffer me to fall.
With forbidden pleasures
Should this vain world charm,
Or its sordid treasures
Spread to work me harm,
Bring to my remembrance
Sad Gethsemane,
Or in darker semblance
Cross-crowned Calvary.
Should Thy mercy send me
Sorrow, toil, and woe,
Or should pain attend me
On my path below,
Grant that I may never
Fail Thy hand to see;
Grant that I may ever
Cast my care on Thee.
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 (1834). Words by James Montgomery.
The Story Behind the Hymn
James Montgomery was an English poet, hymn writer, and newspaper editor who, earlier in his career, had been imprisoned twice on separate occasions, once for printing a poem celebrating the fall of the Bastille and once for reporting on a violent public riot in a manner the authorities of the day considered seditious — direct, lived experience of facing real institutional pressure and punishment for one's convictions that lends particular weight to this hymn's central plea for the strength not to deny one's faith under pressure.
He wrote this hymn's text in 1834, drawing its central image directly from the account of the apostle Peter's threefold denial of Christ on the night of the crucifixion, found in all four Gospels, in which Peter, despite his earlier confident promises of loyalty, denies even knowing Jesus three times before a rooster crows, exactly as Jesus had predicted he would.
The hymn's second verse deliberately widens Peter's specific failure of nerve into a more general prayer against any 'base denial' brought on either by 'forbidden pleasures' or by simple fear of social consequence, asking that the singer's own mind be drawn back specifically to the memory of Gethsemane and Calvary at exactly the moment temptation to deny or compromise one's faith grows strongest.
Spencer Lane composed the tune considerably later, and the hymn became a particularly favored choice for services of confirmation and baptism, sung as a kind of preemptive prayer against the specific failure of nerve under pressure that its own author, twice imprisoned for standing by his own convictions in print, understood from considerably more direct personal experience than most hymn writers of his era.
