264. More Love to Thee, O Christ

The Story Behind the Hymn

Elizabeth Prentiss, daughter of one well-known pastor and wife of another, wrote "More Love to Thee, O Christ" out of the deepest grief of her life. In the autumn of 1851, she and her husband George were living in New York City with their two young children, Annie and Eddy, and expecting a third. That November, Eddy fell ill and died on January 16. Their daughter Bessie was born three months later — and died suddenly in May, after an illness of only a few hours.

Prentiss carried that loss for years before it found its way into this hymn. In 1856, in the midst of continued suffering, she wrote the verses quickly as a private prayer, and then did something unusual for a writer: she showed it to no one. The hymn sat unpublished for thirteen years, until 1869, when Prentiss finally allowed it to be printed as a leaflet. It was included the following year in William Doane's collection Songs of Devotion for Christian Associations, with the tune Doane composed for it.

Some versions of the hymn include an additional stanza that names the grief directly — "let sorrow do its work, come grief or pain" — making explicit what the more commonly printed three stanzas leave implicit: that this prayer for more love was not written from a position of comfort, but forged, slowly and privately, out of the death of two small children.

Doane, who composed music for more than 2,000 gospel songs over his career, including dozens for Fanny Crosby, gave Prentiss's quiet, repetitive prayer a tune simple enough to be sung, almost involuntarily, exactly as she had first written it: alone, on bended knee, asking for nothing but more love.