Lyrics
Oh, now I see the crimson wave!
The fountain deep and wide;
Jesus, my Lord, mighty to save,
Points to His wounded side.
The cleansing stream I see, I see!
I plunge, and, oh, it cleanseth me!
Oh, praise the Lord, it cleanseth me!
It cleanseth me, yes, cleanseth me.
I see the new creation rise,
I hear the speaking blood;
It speaks, polluted nature dies,
Sinks 'neath the cleansing flood.
I rise to walk in Heav'n's own light,
Above the world and sin,
With heart made pure and garments white,
And Christ enthroned within.
Amazing grace! 'tis Heav'n below
To feel the blood applied,
And Jesus, only Jesus know,
My Jesus crucified.
Public domain hymn text and tune (published early 1870s).
The Story Behind the Hymn
"The Cleansing Wave" grew out of a request from within Phoebe Palmer's own family. Palmer, a leading figure in the nineteenth-century holiness movement and a well-known writer and camp-meeting speaker on entire sanctification, was asked by her daughter, Phoebe Palmer Knapp, to write a hymn text that Knapp could set to music. The result, written around 1871, became one of the most widely sung expressions of holiness theology in the camp-meeting tradition.
The hymn entered public use quickly. Historian George Hughes, writing in 1873 about the holiness camp-meeting movement, recorded the hymn already in use at camp meetings by 1872 — evidence of how fast it moved from a private family request into a staple of revival singing.
Phoebe Palmer Knapp, who composed the tune, went on to write music for a considerably more famous hymn a few years later: "Blessed Assurance" (already hymn 6 in this collection), written with Fanny Crosby. "The Cleansing Wave" and "Blessed Assurance" are, in that sense, sister hymns — both carrying Knapp's music, written only a few years apart, and both drawn from the same wellspring of assurance-focused devotional hymnody that flourished in this period.
Where "Blessed Assurance" testifies to settled confidence, "The Cleansing Wave" testifies to a specific moment of being made clean — the crimson wave, the wounded side, the plunge into the cleansing stream. It is a hymn of experience more than doctrine, written by a woman who spent much of her life urging others toward exactly the experience she describes.
