To God be the glory, great things He hath done;
So loved He the world that He gave us His Son,
Who yielded His life an atonement for sin,
And opened the life gate that all may go in.
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord,
Let the earth hear His voice!
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord,
Let the people rejoice!
O come to the Father, through Jesus the Son,
And give Him the glory, great things He hath done.
O perfect redemption, the purchase of blood,
To every believer the promise of God;
The vilest offender who truly believes,
That moment from Jesus a pardon receives.
Great things He hath taught us, great things He hath done,
And great our rejoicing through Jesus the Son;
But purer, and higher, and greater will be
Our wonder, our transport, when Jesus we see.
Public domain hymn text (published 1875). Words by Fanny J. Crosby.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Fanny Crosby wrote this hymn's text in 1875, working once again with the composer William Doane in the same collaborative pattern the two of them used repeatedly across their long partnership — Doane bringing an already-composed tune and Crosby fitting words to it — yet although the hymn achieved a reasonable degree of popularity in America at the time of its writing, it went on to find a far greater and more sustained level of popularity in England over the following several decades, sung widely and enthusiastically in British churches while remaining comparatively less prominent back home in the United States, where it never quite matched the lasting fame of Crosby's other major hymns like 'Blessed Assurance' (hymn 6 in this collection).
That imbalance changed dramatically in the 1950s, when Cliff Barrows, the longtime music director and constant traveling companion for evangelist Billy Graham's massive, internationally broadcast crusades, began featuring this hymn prominently in the musical programming of Graham's American campaigns. Graham's crusades during this period regularly filled entire football stadiums and arenas across the country, drawing tens of thousands of attendees for each individual service and reaching millions more through radio and later television broadcasts.
Sung before those enormous stadium crowds night after night, week after week, across an extended American touring campaign, the hymn was effectively reintroduced to American congregations on a massive scale, who embraced it with genuine new enthusiasm even though, as many were apparently unaware, it had technically already been written on their own native soil some eighty years earlier by an American writer working in New York.
Its simple, direct, easily memorized refrain — 'praise the Lord, praise the Lord, let the earth hear His voice' — proved especially well suited to exactly the kind of large-scale, unrehearsed, spontaneously participatory congregational singing that characterized Graham's crusades, where song leaders like Barrows needed material simple enough for tens of thousands of strangers, many hearing the tune for the first time that very evening, to pick up and sing together almost immediately. That practical fit helped cement the hymn's place as one of the most widely recognized gospel hymns of the entire twentieth century, decades after its comparatively quiet original nineteenth-century composition.
