Lyrics
I've found a Friend, O such a Friend!
He loved me ere I knew Him;
He drew me with the cords of love,
And thus He bound me to Him;
And round my heart still closely twine
Those ties which naught can sever,
For I am His, and He is mine,
Forever and forever.
I've found a Friend, O such a Friend!
He bled, He died to save me;
And not alone the gift of life,
But His own self He gave me.
Naught that I have mine own I call,
I'll hold it for the giver;
My heart, my strength, my life, my all
Are His, and His forever.
I've found a Friend, O such a Friend!
So kind and true and tender,
So wise a counsellor and guide,
So mighty a defender!
From Him who loves me now so well,
What power my soul shall sever?
Shall life or death, shall earth or hell?
No! I am His forever.
Public domain hymn text and tune (text written 1863, published 1866; tune 1878). Words by James G. Small; music by George C. Stebbins.
The Story Behind the Hymn
James Grindlay Small, a Free Church of Scotland minister at Bervie, near Montrose, wrote "I've Found a Friend" in 1863, first titling it "Jesus the Friend." It appeared that same year in the second series of the Revival Hymn Book, and again three years later in Small's own collection, Psalms and Sacred Songs, published in 1866.
The tune sung today was composed considerably later and an ocean away. In 1878, American gospel musician George Coles Stebbins wrote the melody, now known simply as FRIEND, while taking part in an evangelistic campaign in Providence, Rhode Island. When the hymn was picked up by Ira D. Sankey and included in the widely circulated collection Sacred Songs and Solos, it found a vastly larger audience than Small's original Scottish publication had ever reached, becoming a favorite of the massive revival crowds of the late nineteenth century.
Each of the hymn's three verses opens with the same declaration — "I've found a Friend, O such a Friend!" — before turning to a different facet of that friendship: a love that came first, before it was recognized; a love that gave everything, even life itself; and a love strong enough that nothing, not even death, could sever it, echoing Paul's words in Romans 8.
Small died in 1888, twenty-two years after his hymn's first publication and a full decade after Stebbins had given it the tune that would carry it around the world — a modest Scottish minister's private meditation on friendship with Christ, transformed by an American composer into a staple of transatlantic revival singing.
