Lyrics
Rise up, O men of God!
Have done with lesser things;
Give heart and soul and mind and strength
To serve the King of kings.
Rise up, O men of God!
His kingdom tarries long;
Bring in the day of brotherhood
And end the night of wrong.
Rise up, O men of God!
The church for you doth wait,
Her strength unequal to her task;
Rise up, and make her great!
Lift high the cross of Christ!
Tread where His feet have trod;
As brothers of the Son of Man,
Rise up, O men of God.
Public domain hymn text and tune (words 1911, tune c. 1872). Words by William Pierson Merrill; music by William H. Walter.
The Story Behind the Hymn
William Pierson Merrill, a Presbyterian minister active in Chicago in 1911, wrote "Rise Up, O Men of God" at the direct suggestion of Nolan R. Best, editor of the religious journal The Continent, who told Merrill there was an urgent need for a good "brotherhood hymn" to support the Presbyterian Church's Brotherhood Movement. Around the same time, Merrill had also been reading an article titled "The Church of the Strong Men" by Gerald Stanley Lee, which stayed in his mind.
According to Merrill's own account, the hymn came to him with almost no conscious effort while he was riding one of the Lake Michigan steamers back into Chicago for a Sunday service at his own church — the entire text arriving, essentially complete, during that short lake crossing. It was first published as a poem, "To the Brotherhood," in the February 16, 1911, issue of The Continent, and appeared the following year as a hymn in the 1912 Pilgrim Hymnal, set to FESTAL SONG, a tune William H. Walter had composed roughly four decades earlier.
Rather than addressing God directly, the hymn is structured as a summons aimed squarely at the congregation itself — three times repeating "rise up, O men of God" before turning, in its final verse, to the cross as the standard under which that rising is to happen.
Merrill went on to lead New York's Brick Presbyterian Church for over two decades and remained active in the cause of peace throughout his ministry, but it is this one hymn, composed almost involuntarily on a Lake Michigan ferry, that has carried his name furthest into ordinary congregational use.
