323. Safe in the Arms of Jesus

The Story Behind the Hymn

"Safe in the Arms of Jesus" came together in a matter of minutes on April 30, 1868. The composer William Howard Doane arrived at Fanny Crosby's door and told her plainly that he had exactly forty minutes before his train left for Cincinnati, and asked whether she could write words to a melody he had just composed. He played the tune for her once.

Crosby later said the music itself suggested its own words: "Your music says, 'Safe in the arms of Jesus.'" She added that the phrase seemed especially fitting for the children who would soon be gathering at an upcoming Sunday School convention. She went to her desk and, in under twenty minutes, had the text finished — leaving Doane time to catch his train with a completed hymn in hand.

Few of Crosby's more than eight thousand hymns matched this one for reach. It became a fixture at funerals, especially children's funerals, where its imagery of rest and shelter offered a register of comfort other hymns did not attempt, and it was sung just as often as a lullaby for the living. Its most historically notable use came on August 8, 1885, when the hymn was played at the funeral of former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant.

What began as an exercise in speed — a composer catching a train, a poet working against a forty-minute clock — became one of the nineteenth century's most enduring hymns of comfort, sung at gravesides and cradles alike for the century and a half since.