8. Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior

The Story Behind the Hymn

Fanny Crosby wrote this hymn at the request of William Doane, a wealthy businessman and amateur composer who collaborated with her on dozens of hymns over the years. Doane would typically bring her a finished tune and ask her to write words to fit it.

Doane and Crosby worked together this way on a number of well-known hymns, with Doane composing the melody first far more often than the words came first, a working method Crosby found she could adapt to easily despite her more usual practice of composing text on its own.

For this hymn, Doane asked specifically for a text built around the story of blind Bartimaeus in Mark 10:46-52, who sat begging by the roadside near Jericho and cried out for Jesus even as the crowd around him tried to hush him into silence.

Bartimaeus refused to be quieted, and Jesus stopped, called him over, and restored his sight.

Crosby, who had been blind since infancy, identified closely with Bartimaeus — not so much with his blindness itself, which she had lived with her whole life without any apparent bitterness, but with his persistence, his refusal to let the disapproving crowd silence his one request simply to be seen and heard.

She wrote about this exact parallel often in her own devotional writing, describing her blindness less as a tragedy than as a circumstance she had learned to live fully within.

The hymn’s repeated, almost desperate plea not to be passed over reflects a theme that runs through much of Crosby’s writing: not confident triumph, but the plain vulnerability of asking not to be overlooked, drawn quite directly from her own decades of literally being overlooked by a sighted world moving past her.