216. Break Thou the Bread of Life

The Story Behind the Hymn

Mary Artemisia Lathbury was born in 1841 in Manchester, New York, the daughter of a Methodist minister, and she grew up steeped in both the hymnody and the itinerant church culture of nineteenth-century American Methodism. She showed early artistic talent and worked for years as an illustrator and writer for religious publishing houses in New York, including the Methodist Book Concern, contributing both drawings and devotional verse to Sunday school papers well before she was known as a hymn writer.

Her hymn-writing career became closely tied to a new institution: the Chautauqua Assembly, founded in 1874 on the shore of Lake Chautauqua in western New York by the Methodist minister John Heyl Vincent and the businessman Lewis Miller. Chautauqua began as a training program for Sunday school teachers, held outdoors each summer, and quickly grew into one of the most influential adult education movements in America, combining Bible study, lectures, and the arts. Vincent recruited Lathbury to write hymns and devotional texts for the assembly's programs, and she became so closely associated with the movement that she was later given the informal title “Poet Laureate of Chautauqua.”

She wrote “Break Thou the Bread of Life” in 1877 specifically for Chautauqua's morning Bible study hour, not as a communion hymn. Its central image draws directly on John 6, where Jesus feeds the five thousand and then tells the crowd that follows him, “I am the bread of life.” For Lathbury, the hymn was a prayer for understanding as students opened their Bibles each morning at the lakeside assembly: the plea to “break the bread” of Scripture just as Christ once broke the loaves, so that the words on the page might become genuine spiritual nourishment rather than dead text. Her friend and fellow Chautauqua musician William F. Sherwin composed the tune, fittingly named “Bread of Life,” the same year.

Only later did the hymn take on its now-familiar second life as a communion hymn, a shift owing largely to a third verse — “Thou art the Bread of Life” — added afterward by the English writer Alexander Groves, which made the eucharistic reading of the text more explicit. Many hymnals since have printed both uses side by side, and congregations have sung it both as an invitation to Scripture and as a prayer before the Lord's Table, a flexibility that has helped keep it in continuous use across a wide range of Christian traditions for well over a century.

Lathbury continued writing for Chautauqua for decades, including another enduring vesper hymn, “Day Is Dying in the West,” written for the assembly's evening services on the lake. She never married, devoting her later life to writing, illustration, and the Chautauqua community she had helped shape from its earliest years, and she died in 1913, having outlived the founder Vincent by only a few years but leaving behind hymns that carried the movement's emphasis on personal Bible study far beyond the shores of the lake where they were first sung.