Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah,
Offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
'Twixt that darkness and that light.
Then to side with truth is noble,
When we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit,
And 'tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses
While the coward stands aside,
Till the multitude make virtue
Of the faith they had denied.
By the light of burning martyrs,
Jesus' bleeding feet I track,
Toiling up new Calvaries ever
With the cross that turns not back;
New occasions teach new duties,
Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward,
Who would keep abreast of truth.
Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong,
Yet the scaffold sways the future,
And, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow,
Keeping watch above His own.
Public domain hymn text (published 1845). Words by James Russell Lowell.
The Story Behind the Hymn
James Russell Lowell was born in 1819 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, into a prominent New England family, and grew up to become one of the most celebrated American poets of his generation, counted among the “Fireside Poets” alongside Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier — writers whose work was popular enough to be read aloud in American parlors and taught to schoolchildren for generations. He was also a committed abolitionist, using both his poetry and his work as a journalist and editor to argue against slavery at a time when the issue was tearing at the country's political fabric.
This hymn began life not as a hymn at all but as a poem titled “The Present Crisis,” written in December 1845 in direct response to the United States' proposed annexation of Texas as a new slave state. Lowell wrote it as an urgent, unapologetically political call to moral courage, arguing that the nation faced a defining test of conscience over slavery and warning against the comfortable choice of silence or compromise. The original poem runs to some ninety lines, far longer than what any hymnal eventually printed.
Decades later, hymnal editors selected a handful of its stanzas — the ones with the least specific reference to the Texas crisis and the most universal application to moral choice — and paired them with hymn tunes, most enduringly the Welsh melody “Ebenezer,” composed by Thomas John Williams in 1890. Stripped of its original, narrowly political context, the poem's language about standing for truth even when it is unpopular or costly took on a broader devotional meaning, applicable to any believer facing a moment of moral decision rather than to one specific nineteenth-century controversy.
Because it began as secular political verse rather than devotional writing, its path into the hymnal was unusual: it was not written for congregational worship at all, but adopted into it after the fact, on the strength of its central image — that every person and every generation faces some defining moment when “truth” and “falsehood” stand opposed, and the choice, once made, echoes forward for good or ill.
The hymn has remained particularly associated with calls to social conscience and moral courage within the church, sung at moments when congregations have wanted to underscore that faith carries public as well as private obligations — a fitting afterlife for a text that began as one poet's urgent protest against the injustice of his own time.
