Lyrics
From Greenland's icy mountains,
From India's coral strand;
Where Afric's sunny fountains
Roll down their golden sand:
From many an ancient river,
From many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver
Their land from error's chain.
Can men, whose souls are lighted
With wisdom from on high,
Can they to men benighted
The lamp of life deny?
Salvation! O salvation!
The joyful sound proclaim,
Till earth's remotest nation
Has learned Messiah's name.
Waft, waft, ye winds, His story;
And you, ye waters, roll,
Till, like a sea of glory,
It spreads from pole to pole:
Till o'er our ransomed nature
The Lamb for sinners slain,
Redeemer, King, Creator,
In bliss returns to reign.
Public domain hymn text and tune (text 1819, tune 1823). Words by Reginald Heber; music by Lowell Mason. Written in the missionary language and outlook of its early 19th-century British context.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Reginald Heber, later the Anglican Bishop of Calcutta, wrote this hymn in 1819 while staying with his father-in-law, the vicar of Wrexham parish church in Wales. A royal letter issued that February had authorized a special churchwide offering for foreign missions across Great Britain, with Wrexham's observance set for Whitsunday, and Heber was asked, essentially at the last minute, to provide something new for the congregation to sing at the missionary meeting.
By the most frequently repeated account of its writing, Heber stepped away to another part of the room while the rest of the household continued talking, and returned about twenty minutes later with three finished stanzas. Asked to add a fourth, he supplied one more before the hymn was sung the following morning in Wrexham Church. Within about a year, thousands of copies had already been printed and distributed.
The hymn quickly became known simply as "the missionary hymn" — for generations, arguably the most widely sung hymn of its kind in the English-speaking world, sweeping across a wide arc of geography, from Greenland to India to Africa, to describe a missionary call understood, in the language and worldview of early nineteenth-century Britain, as bringing "light" to lands its writer described as "benighted".
That framing, common to missionary literature of Heber's era, reads very differently to modern readers than it did to Heber's original Welsh congregation, and the hymn is now sung far less often than in the century following its composition. It remains, nonetheless, a historically significant document of how nineteenth-century Western Christians understood and described missionary work — written, remarkably, in the space of a single evening's conversation.
