Art thou weary, art thou languid,
Art thou sore distressed?
“Come to Me,” saith One, “and, coming,
Be at rest.”
Hath He marks to lead me to Him,
If He be my Guide?
“In His feet and hands are wound-prints,
And His side.”
Public domain hymn text (1862 (English translation)). Words by John Mason Neale, after Stephen the Sabaite.
The Story Behind the Hymn
This hymn's underlying text is attributed to Stephen the Sabaite, an eighth-century monk who lived at Mar Saba, a monastery built into a cliffside in the Judean desert near Jerusalem that remains an active religious community to this day, making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited monasteries in the world. Very little else is known of Stephen's own life beyond his association with that monastery and the small body of Greek devotional poetry attributed to him.
John Mason Neale, an English clergyman and prolific translator of ancient Greek and Latin hymns into English, discovered and translated the text in 1862, part of a much larger lifelong project of bringing early and medieval Christian hymnody — largely unknown to ordinary English congregations of his day — into accessible English verse. Neale suffered from chronic poor health for much of his own life and was repeatedly passed over for advancement within the Church of England due to his High Church sympathies, spending much of his career running a charitable sisterhood and orphanage rather than holding any prominent pulpit.
Neale structured his translation as a call-and-response dialogue, an unusual form for a hymn: each verse poses a direct question — is there truly rest to be found, and how can this Guide be trusted — which is then answered in the following lines, a structure that closely mirrors the catechetical question-and-answer format used in early Eastern monastic teaching, the very tradition Stephen the Sabaite himself would have been formed within at Mar Saba centuries earlier.
The hymn's final answer to its own repeated questions — that the Guide can be trusted specifically because He carries permanent wound-prints from His own suffering — reflects a theology considerably closer to the ascetic, suffering-focused spirituality of early Eastern desert monasticism than to the more comfortable, domestic devotional hymnody common in nineteenth-century England, a genuinely different theological voice that Neale worked for decades to make audible to English-speaking congregations.
