270. Trusting Jesus, That Is All

The Story Behind the Hymn

Edgar Page Stites, the same New Jersey riverboat pilot and lay preacher who wrote "Beulah Land," also wrote the words to "Trusting Jesus, That Is All," publishing it, as he did some of his verse, in a local newspaper around 1876 rather than directly in a hymnal. That newspaper clipping eventually found its way into the hands of D. L. Moody, who recognized something worth setting to music in it and passed it along to his song leader, Ira D. Sankey, with instructions to compose a tune.

Sankey did so, and the completed hymn — words and melody together — was published that same year in Gospel Songs No. 2, one of the widely used collections Sankey compiled during his long partnership with Moody's evangelistic campaigns.

The hymn is built almost entirely around a single word, repeated in nearly every line — trusting — simply, through storms, brightly, while singing, while praying, in danger, for a lifetime, and finally "till within the jasper wall," a reference to the walls of the New Jerusalem described in Revelation 21. Rather than developing an argument for trust, the hymn simply performs it, the same short word recurring so often across four verses and a refrain that singing it becomes, in effect, an act of the very trust it describes.

Stites, largely self-taught as a writer and never a professional hymnist, produced only a handful of hymn texts across his lifetime — but between this hymn and "Beulah Land," both born from ordinary, undramatic means of transmission, a newspaper clipping and a personal manuscript passed hand to hand, he left two of the era's most enduringly simple hymns of Christian assurance.