331. O Master, Let Me Walk with Thee

The Story Behind the Hymn

Washington Gladden wrote "O Master, Let Me Walk with Thee" in 1879 for Sunday Afternoon, a magazine he edited, publishing it under the title "Walking with God" as a poem rather than a hymn text. Gladden had not written it to be sung; it was his friend, the Reverend C. H. Richards, who recognized its potential as congregational song and helped move it into hymnals.

Gladden, born on a Pennsylvania farm in 1836 and ordained into the Congregational ministry after graduating from Williams College, became known as one of the era's most prominent liberal clergymen and one of the earliest and most influential voices of the Social Gospel movement — the conviction that Christian faith carried direct obligations toward social reform, labor conditions, and economic justice, not only personal piety.

The hymn was written during the years following the Civil War, a period in which Gladden saw a great deal in American public life that troubled his conscience: labor conflict, urban poverty, and a widening gap between religious profession and social practice among his contemporaries. "O Master, Let Me Walk with Thee" reads as a personal plea shaped by that wider concern — not a request to be removed from "lowly paths of service," but to be given the strength and patience to walk them well.

Its request for "some clear, winning word" to move "the slow of heart," and for guidance in helping "wayward feet" find the right way, casts discipleship less as private devotion and more as active engagement with other people's struggles — a hymn about following Christ that spends nearly as much of its language on serving others as on the walk with God itself.