Lyrics
O Zion, haste, thy mission high fulfilling,
To tell to all the world that God is Light;
That He who made all nations is not willing
One soul should perish, lost in shades of night.
Publish glad tidings, tidings of peace;
Tidings of Jesus, redemption, and release.
Behold, how many thousands still are lying,
Bound in the darksome prison-house of sin,
With none to tell them of the Savior's dying,
Or of the life He died for them to win.
Proclaim to every people, tongue, and nation
That God, in whom they live and move, is love;
Tell how He stooped to save His lost creation,
And died on earth that we might live above.
Give of thy sons to bear the message glorious;
Give of thy wealth to speed them on their way;
Pour out thy soul for them in prayer victorious;
O Zion, haste to bring the brighter day.
Public domain hymn text (written 1868, refrain completed 1871). Words by Mary Ann Thomson; tune TIDINGS by James Walch.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Mary Ann Faulkner Thomson wrote "O Zion, Haste" in 1868 while nursing one of her own children through a serious bout of typhoid fever, in Philadelphia, where she spent most of her life active at the Church of the Annunciation. Fond of a particular tune Henry Smart had written for Frederick Faber's hymn "Hark, Hark, My Soul," she shaped her own verses to fit its meter.
Thomson completed the greater part of the hymn that year, but could not settle on a refrain she found satisfactory, and set the unfinished piece aside. It remained incomplete for three years before she finally wrote the refrain — "publish glad tidings, tidings of peace" — in 1871, finishing a hymn she had begun at her sick child's bedside.
The finished text casts Zion, standing for the church as a whole, as an entity being urged to complete an unfinished mission — to carry word of salvation to the "many thousands still… lying, bound in the darksome prison-house of sin" who have no one to tell them otherwise. Its final verse turns from description to direct appeal, asking the church to give both its people and its wealth to the effort.
Thomson wrote other hymns and poems across her lifetime, but by her own account and that of hymnal historians, "O Zion, Haste" is the only one to have survived in any lasting use — a missionary hymn that itself took three patient years to reach its own finished form.
