Lyrics
There is a name I love to hear,
I love to sing its worth;
It sounds like music in my ear,
The sweetest name on earth.
O how I love Jesus,
O how I love Jesus,
O how I love Jesus,
Because He first loved me!
It tells me of a Savior's love,
Who died to set me free;
It tells me of His precious blood,
The sinner's perfect plea.
It tells of one whose loving heart
Can feel my deepest woe;
Who in each sorrow bears a part
That none can bear below.
Public domain hymn text (written 1855). Words by Frederick Whitfield; the now-famous refrain, "O how I love Jesus," is of separate, anonymous origin, attached to Whitfield's verses later in the nineteenth century.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Frederick Whitfield wrote the verses of this hymn in 1855 while studying theology at Trinity College, Dublin, before he had even been ordained. By one frequently told account, the very first lines came to him almost by accident, out of a playful exchange of words with his sisters one morning when he had come down late for breakfast — a domestic, unremarkable beginning for a hymn that would go on to be sung in churches worldwide.
Whitfield published the verses on hymn sheets and leaflets before formally including them in his 1861 collection Sacred Poems and Prose. What he did not write, however, is the part of the hymn most people know best. The refrain, "O how I love Jesus, because He first loved me," is of entirely separate and anonymous origin — a piece of American gospel-song vocabulary that began circulating independently in the 1860s and had, by the mid-1860s, been attached to Whitfield's English verses, giving the hymn the call-and-response shape it has today.
That kind of pairing — a formal, carefully metered English hymn text joined to a looser, more exuberant American camp-meeting-style refrain — was common in nineteenth-century hymnody, though few examples have proven as durable or as widely recognized as this one. Many singers today could supply the refrain from memory without being able to name a single one of Whitfield's original verses.
Whitfield went on to a long career in the Anglican Church, eventually serving as vicar of St. Mary's, Hastings, but it is this one hymn, written as a young theology student and later completed by a writer whose name has been entirely lost to history, that carried his name furthest.
