319. None of Self and All of Thee

The Story Behind the Hymn

Theodore Monod wrote "None of Self and All of Thee" in English in July 1874, during a series of consecration meetings held at Broadlands, the Hampshire estate of Lord and Lady Mount-Temple. Monod, a French Reformed pastor visiting from Paris, gave the finished text to Lord Mount-Temple at the close of the meetings, and it was Mount-Temple who first had it printed, on the back of a leaflet.

Monod was born in Paris in 1836, the son of a French Reformed minister, and trained first for law before turning to the ministry. He studied at Western Theological Seminary near Pittsburgh before returning to France, where he spent decades as pastor of the Chapelle du Nord in Paris. "None of Self and All of Thee" became his best-known contribution to English-language hymnody, despite French being his native tongue.

Two different tunes have carried the text since, each tied to a slightly different version of the words: James Mountain's setting keeps closer to Monod's original wording, "O the bitter shame and sorrow," while James McGranahan's 1886 setting — the version presented here, and the one more widely sung in American gospel hymnody — reworks the text into four-line stanzas each followed by a repeated refrain of the stanza's own key phrase.

What both versions preserve is the hymn's progression: a self-description that moves in exact stages from "all of self, and none of Thee" to "some of self, and some of Thee," then "less of self, and more of Thee," and finally "none of self, and all of Thee" — consecration charted not as a single decision but as a gradual surrender, one stanza at a time.