4. Nearer, My God, to Thee

The Story Behind the Hymn

Sarah Flower Adams was an English poet and former actress, part of a literary, politically engaged London family. Her father was a radical journalist, and she counted the poet Robert Browning among her personal friends.

She and her husband belonged to a Unitarian congregation in London, though this hymn has since been embraced far beyond that tradition and sung across nearly every branch of Christianity.

Adams based the hymn on Jacob’s dream at Bethel, recounted in Genesis 28:10-22 — Jacob, fleeing alone and afraid from his brother Esau, dreams of a stairway reaching to heaven with angels ascending and descending on it, and wakes to realize God had been present with him the whole time.

She used that image of an uncertain, solitary ascent as her own metaphor for the Christian’s uneven, often frightened walk toward God.

Adams wrote the hymn for a London congregation whose minister, William Johnson Fox, had asked members to contribute new hymns for a sermon series he was preparing on the book of Genesis.

Composer Lowell Mason — also responsible for the tune of ‘Work, for the Night Is Coming,’ hymn 63 in this collection — set Adams’s words to music not long after, and the hymn spread quickly on both sides of the Atlantic.

Adams died young, at forty-three, of tuberculosis, having written comparatively little else that matched this hymn’s lasting popularity.

Its most famous association came seven decades later, through a widely told but historically disputed story that the ship’s band aboard the RMS Titanic played it as the vessel sank in April 1912.

Surviving accounts differ on exactly what the band played that night, but the story stuck regardless, and the hymn has carried an association with quiet courage in the face of death ever since.