254. I Would Be True

The Story Behind the Hymn

Howard Arnold Walter was twenty-three years old and teaching English in Japan when he wrote these lines on January 1, 1907, as part of a letter home to his mother. He titled the eight-line piece "My Creed" — not a hymn at all in his own mind, but a personal statement of the kind of person he hoped to become, sent to the one person he most wanted to share it with.

His mother, evidently proud of what her son had written, sent a copy on to Harper's Magazine, where it appeared in print not long afterward. From there, the words came to the attention of Joseph Peek, an itinerant Methodist lay preacher with no formal musical training. According to the frequently repeated account, Peek read the poem and simply whistled a tune to fit it on the spot — an unlikely origin for a melody that has stayed paired with Walter's words ever since.

Walter himself did not live to see how far his private creed would travel. He went on to serve as a missionary and teacher in India, working among Muslim students in Lahore, until a severe influenza epidemic swept through the region in 1918 and took his life at the age of thirty-five.

Unlike most hymns, "I Would Be True" contains no direct address to God at all — no petition, no praise, only a list of resolutions. That has made it as much at home in school assemblies and character-education settings as in church, a young man's private letter to his mother that quietly became one of the most widely memorized statements of Christian character in the English language.