Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above;
Praise the mount—I'm fixed upon it—
Mount of Thy redeeming love.
Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Hither by Thy help I'm come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed His precious blood.
O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I'm constrained to be!
Let that grace now, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here's my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.
Public domain hymn text (published 1758). Words by Robert Robinson.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Robert Robinson wrote this hymn's text at just twenty-two years old in 1758, not long after his own turbulent path to Christian conversion, which by his own later account had begun in genuinely unpromising circumstances. As a teenager in London, Robinson had been drawn into a rough local gang, reportedly attending a sermon by the famous evangelist George Whitefield initially as something close to a mocking dare among his companions, intending to make fun of the preacher rather than to listen seriously.
Instead, Whitefield's sermon that day unsettled Robinson far more deeply than he had expected, and it took roughly three more years of ongoing inner struggle before he finally experienced what he considered his genuine conversion, at age twenty. He went on to become first a Methodist, then a Baptist, and eventually an Independent minister, pastoring congregations in Norfolk for many years and also working as a respected historian and writer on Baptist church history later in his career.
Despite this outwardly successful ministry, Robinson struggled by several later accounts throughout much of his adult life with recurring periods of spiritual doubt, discouragement, and what contemporaries described as a wandering away from the fervent faith of his youth, including reported associations later in life with theologically unorthodox circles that concerned some of his former colleagues. The hymn's striking third verse, with its now-famous admission 'prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love,' is widely read by hymnologists as an almost eerily prophetic anticipation of exactly this later struggle — a confident twenty-two-year-old, writing exuberantly about God's grace, apparently already sensing and naming in advance the very temptation toward spiritual drift that would trouble him for decades afterward.
According to one frequently repeated but unverified anecdote, Robinson, many years later and in a season of deep discouragement, was traveling by stagecoach when a fellow passenger began humming this very hymn's tune, not recognizing its author sitting beside her; when she asked what he thought of the song, Robinson is said to have replied, with evident sadness, that he was the man who had written those words many years before, and that he would give a great deal to feel now the same freedom of spirit he had felt then. True or embellished, the story captures precisely the tension between the hymn's confident, thankful praise and its author's more complicated later life — a tension that has not diminished the hymn's enduring popularity, still commonly sung today at baptisms and services of Christian commitment.
