Lyrics
"Almost persuaded" now to believe;
"Almost persuaded" Christ to receive;
Seems now some soul to say,
"Go, Spirit, go Thy way;
Some more convenient day
On Thee I'll call."
"Almost persuaded," come, come today;
"Almost persuaded," turn not away;
Jesus invites you here,
Angels are lingering near,
Prayers rise from hearts so dear;
O wanderer, come.
"Almost persuaded," harvest is past!
"Almost persuaded," doom comes at last!
"Almost" cannot avail;
"Almost" is but to fail!
Sad, sad, that bitter wail,
"Almost," but lost!
Public domain hymn text and tune (published 1871). Words and music by Philip P. Bliss.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Philip P. Bliss wrote "Almost Persuaded" in 1871, five years before his death in the Ashtabula train disaster, after hearing a Reverend Brundage close a sermon on Acts 26:28 — the account of King Agrippa telling Paul, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian." Brundage's closing line stayed with Bliss: "He who is almost persuaded is almost saved, and to be almost saved is to be entirely lost."
Bliss set both text and tune to that idea, publishing the hymn the same year in The Charm, a collection issued by the Chicago firm Root & Cady. Unlike many gospel songs of the period, it carries no separate chorus — each of its three verses stands alone, tracing a single soul's movement from hesitation, to invitation, to a final verse in which the moment for decision has quietly closed.
That structure made it an especially effective "invitation hymn," sung at the close of a service after the sermon, while the preacher invited anyone not yet converted to come forward. Rather than offering comfort, the hymn was built to unsettle — its final verse, "harvest is past," "doom comes at last," was meant to press the listener toward an answer rather than let the moment pass unanswered.
More than 150 years later, the hymn remains one of the starkest evangelistic songs in American gospel music, its title phrase — "almost persuaded" — passing into wider religious vocabulary as shorthand for the particular danger of a decision indefinitely delayed.
