296. More Holiness Give Me

The Story Behind the Hymn

Philip P. Bliss wrote "More Holiness Give Me" in 1873, three years before his death in the Ashtabula train disaster, first publishing it under the plainer title "My Prayer" in Sunshine for the Sunday Schools, his second hymn collection, issued by the John Church Music Company of Cincinnati. Bliss most likely wrote it while based in the Chicago area, in the period after he had left secular songwriting behind to work full-time alongside evangelists D. L. Moody and Daniel W. Whittle.

The hymn is built on an unusually simple structure even by the standards of Bliss's own direct style: nearly every line across all three verses begins with the single word "more," followed by a short, specific request — more patience, more tears for another's sorrow, more meekness, more freedom from the small compromises of daily life. Rather than asking for a single dramatic change, the hymn asks, repeatedly and cumulatively, for incremental growth in a long list of ordinary virtues.

That structure gave the hymn an obvious usefulness as a personal, almost private prayer rather than a hymn of public testimony or invitation, and it became a favorite at the revival meetings Bliss took part in during the final years of his short career.

Bliss died in December 1876, only three years after writing this hymn, in the same rail disaster that also produced the discovery of his unpublished "I Will Sing of My Redeemer." "More Holiness Give Me," by contrast, was fully finished and already circulating in Sunday schools well before that December — one of the plainer, quieter entries in a catalog otherwise dominated by his more dramatic gospel songs.