53. Wonderful Words of Life

The Story Behind the Hymn

Philip Bliss was one of the most commercially successful and genuinely prolific gospel songwriters actively working during the 1870s, closely associated with and working directly alongside evangelist D. L. Moody's large-scale revival campaigns across America, and personally responsible for producing dozens of hymns that quickly became enduring staples of American congregational and gospel singing, including composing the now-famous tune for 'It Is Well with My Soul' (hymn 7 in this collection), a hymn written by his close personal friend Horatio Spafford following Spafford's own devastating family tragedy at sea.

In December 1876, Bliss and his wife, Lucy, were traveling together by train from Chicago toward Pennsylvania when the wooden railroad bridge their train was crossing over a ravine near Ashtabula, Ohio, suddenly and catastrophically collapsed beneath them during a severe snowstorm, sending the entire train's passenger cars plunging into the frozen ravine below, where the wreckage of the derailed cars almost immediately caught fire, trapping many passengers inside amid the flames and freezing conditions.

Bliss reportedly survived the initial violent crash itself and, according to several survivor accounts collected afterward, successfully managed to climb free of the burning wreckage on his own, but then deliberately went back into the burning train cars in a desperate attempt to locate and free his wife, Lucy, who remained trapped somewhere inside the wreckage. Neither of them ultimately survived the disaster, which claimed roughly ninety-two lives in total; Bliss himself was only thirty-eight years old at the time of his death, cutting short what had already been an extraordinarily productive songwriting career at its peak.

The sudden, violent tragedy shocked and deeply affected the entire American evangelical community at the time, given how widely and closely Bliss's characteristically cheerful, musically confident gospel hymns — including this one, celebrating the life-giving 'wonderful words of life' found specifically in Scripture — were already known, loved, and actively sung in churches across the country at the very moment of his sudden and violent death. Many of Bliss's surviving hymns, including this one, took on a distinctly added layer of poignancy and emotional weight for congregations singing them in the years immediately following the accident, keenly aware of the tragic circumstances that had just claimed the life of the songwriter whose confident, joyful melodies they were still actively singing every Sunday.