Lyrics
Fill Thou my life, O Lord my God,
In every part with praise,
That my whole being may proclaim
Thy being and Thy ways.
Not for the lip of praise alone,
Nor e'en the praising heart
I ask, but for a life made up
Of praise in every part!
Praise in the common words I speak,
Life's common looks and tones,
In fellowship in hearth and board
With my belovèd ones;
Not in the temple crowd alone
Where holy voices chime,
But in the silent paths of earth,
The quiet rooms of time.
Fill every part of me with praise;
Let all my being speak
Of Thee and of Thy love, O Lord,
Poor though I be, and weak.
So shalt Thou, Lord, from me, e'en me,
Receive the glory due;
And so shall I begin on earth
The song forever new.
So shall each fear, each fret, each care
Be turned into a song,
And every winding of the way
The echo shall prolong;
So shall no part of day or night
From sacredness be free;
But all my life, in every step
Be fellowship with Thee.
Public domain hymn text (1866), based on Psalm 71:8.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Horatius Bonar wrote "Fill Thou My Life" in twelve four-line stanzas, publishing it in the third series of his Hymns of Faith and Hope in 1866 under the original title "Life's Praise." Like most hymnals since, this arrangement includes only about half of Bonar's original text, lightly adapted.
Bonar, born in 1808 and educated at the University of Edinburgh, became a Presbyterian minister at thirty and in 1843 joined the Free Church of Scotland during the Disruption, the split that divided the established Church of Scotland that year. Over his lifetime he wrote prolifically — letters, books, tracts, and around six hundred hymns — many of which were championed and popularized in America by the evangelist and hymn compiler Ira Sankey. Another of Bonar's texts, I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say, also appears in this collection.
There is a striking irony in Bonar's own relationship to his hymns: both congregations he served, first at Kelso and later at Chalmers Memorial Free Church in Edinburgh's Grange district, did not permit hymn singing in worship. Bonar wrote hundreds of hymns that would go on to be sung by congregations around the world, yet he himself never once heard his own hymns sung by his own people in his own church.
The hymn's theme fits that irony in an unexpected way: it is not a hymn about singing in the temple, but explicitly about praise carried into "life's common looks and tones," into "the silent paths of earth, the quiet rooms of time" — praise that does not depend on a congregation or a sanctuary at all, but is woven instead into the whole ordinary texture of a life.
