256. Whosoever Will

The Story Behind the Hymn

Philip P. Bliss wrote "Whosoever Will" during the winter of 1869-1870, several years before his death in the Ashtabula train disaster, after hearing the English evangelist Henry Moorhouse preach in Chicago. Moorhouse preached from the same text, John 3:16, every night for an entire week — an approach unusual enough at the time that it left a lasting impression on many who heard him, Bliss included. What struck listeners was Moorhouse's insistence on the sheer freeness and fullness of the Gospel invitation: that salvation was offered to whosoever would simply come and receive it.

Bliss set that theme, and very nearly Moorhouse's own vocabulary, directly into both the words and the tune of this hymn, publishing it in 1870 in a songbook titled The Prize, edited by George F. Root — at the time, Bliss was still working for Root's Chicago music publishing firm, several years before he left secular songwriting to join D. L. Moody's evangelistic campaigns full time. He later included it again in his own collection, Gospel Songs, in 1874.

The hymn's structure mirrors its message: rather than building toward a single climactic point, each verse and the refrain alike circle back, again and again, to the same four words — "whosoever will may come" — repeated so often that the invitation itself becomes impossible to miss or misremember.

Written at the very start of Bliss's brief but prolific career as a gospel songwriter, "Whosoever Will" anticipates the plain, direct, deeply repetitive style that would mark his best-known later hymns, most of them written in the six short years remaining to him before Ashtabula.