Lyrics
When all my labors and trials are o'er,
And I am safe on that beautiful shore,
Just to be near the dear Lord I adore
Will through the ages be glory for me.
O that will be glory for me,
Glory for me, glory for me!
When by His grace I shall look on His face,
That will be glory, be glory for me!
When, by the gift of His infinite grace,
I am accorded in heaven a place,
Just to be there and to look on His face
Will through the ages be glory for me.
Friends will be there I have loved long ago,
Joy like a river around me will flow,
Yet, just a smile from my Savior, I know,
Will through the ages be glory for me.
Public domain hymn text and tune (published 1900). Words and music by Charles H. Gabriel.
The Story Behind the Hymn
"O That Will Be Glory" owes its title, if not its music, to a line the hymn's writer heard from someone else entirely. Charles H. Gabriel, an enormously prolific gospel song composer, took the phrase from Ed Card, superintendent of the Sunshine Rescue Mission in St. Louis, Missouri, whose prayers reportedly ended, again and again, with the same enthusiastic line: "And that will be glory for me!"
Gabriel wrote the hymn in the early summer of 1900. By his own account, he was out bicycling with a Chicago publisher he was preparing manuscripts for — almost certainly Edwin Othello Excell — when he turned to his companion and said, "I've got a song that is going to live!" before quoting a few lines of what became "O That Will Be Glory." Excell published it that same year in a collection titled Make His Praise Glorious, paying Gabriel ten dollars for it.
Gabriel's confidence proved well founded. Within a decade and a half, the hymn had reportedly been translated into at least seventeen languages, with tens of millions of copies in print, and it went on to serve for thirty-five years, from 1930 to 1965, as the theme song of evangelist G. E. Lowman's international radio broadcast.
Its lasting appeal lies largely in its plain, repeated simplicity — three short verses, each ending in the identical claim, wrapped around a refrain built from a single joyful word, repeated: glory. Few gospel songs of the era matched its combination of theological modesty and sheer, unguarded exuberance.
