There were ninety and nine that safely lay
In the shelter of the fold,
But one was out on the hills away,
Far off from the gates of gold,
Away on the mountains wild and bare,
Away from the tender Shepherd's care.
"Lord, Thou hast here Thy ninety and nine;
Are they not enough for Thee?"
But the Shepherd made answer: "This of Mine
Has wandered away from Me;
And although the road be rough and steep,
I go to the desert to find My sheep."
But none of the ransomed ever knew
How deep were the waters crossed;
Nor how dark was the night that the Lord passed through
Ere He found His sheep that was lost.
Out in the desert He heard its cry,
Sick and helpless, and ready to die.
\”Lord, whence are those blood drops all the way
That mark out the mountain’s track?\”
\”They were shed for one who had gone astray
Ere the Shepherd could bring him back.\”
\”Lord, whence are Thy hands so rent and torn?\”
\”They’re pierced tonight by many a thorn.\”
And all through the mountains, thunder-riven,
And up from the rocky steep,
There arose a glad cry to the gate of heaven,
\”Rejoice! I have found My sheep!\”
And the angels echoed around the throne,
\”Rejoice, for the Lord brings back His own!\”
Public domain hymn text (published 1868). Words by Elizabeth C. Clephane.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Elizabeth Clephane was a Scottish poet who lived in frail, declining health for most of her relatively short adult life, ultimately dying of tuberculosis in 1869 at only thirty-eight years old, having published almost nothing under her own name during her own lifetime; the great majority of her surviving poems, including this one, were only discovered among her papers and subsequently published in a small Scottish religious periodical, 'The Christian Age,' after her death, meaning Clephane herself never lived to see this or most of her other work reach any wider audience.
The hymn is a direct, carefully constructed poetic retelling of the parable of the lost sheep found in Luke 15, in which a shepherd deliberately leaves ninety-nine already-safe sheep behind in order to search personally for a single remaining sheep that has wandered away from the flock, and Clephane's verses track the parable's specific narrative arc with unusual fidelity and sequence — first the sheep's initial wandering, then the shepherd's genuinely difficult and dangerous search 'away on the mountains, wild and bare,' and finally the shepherd's exhausted but joyful eventual rescue and return — rather than simply referencing or alluding to the biblical story in passing, as many hymns loosely built around biblical parables tend to do.
The now-famous tune most commonly paired with Clephane's words was composed considerably later, in 1874, five full years after Clephane's own death, by Ira Sankey, the professional singer and song leader who worked closely and continuously alongside evangelist D. L. Moody throughout Moody's major revival campaigns across both Britain and America.
According to a frequently repeated account of the tune's origin, Sankey composed the melody essentially on the spot and entirely by ear, sight-reading Clephane's already-printed poem directly from a newspaper clipping someone had handed him only moments before he unexpectedly needed to sing something appropriate at a large revival meeting taking place in Edinburgh, Scotland — reportedly improvising the tune extemporaneously in front of the assembled crowd with no advance preparation or rehearsal whatsoever, and the tune he improvised under that pressure that single evening has remained permanently and inseparably attached to Clephane's text in every hymnal published ever since.
