Thursday, August 14, 2025

It is the 14th of August 2025. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

There are few things I like more than the “hidden history” of Hymns- so much that I have been collecting my favorites for an upcoming weekend show (Like how Felix Mendelssohn who wrote the tune we use for Hark the Herald Angel Sing said that “whatever you use the tune for, it’s certainly not appropriate for worship).

And as today is the anniversary of the author of one of these, I’ll break it out for your listening pleasure and edification.

The author in question was one Sarah Flower Adams of Great Harlow in Essex, England, born in 1805 to Eliza and Benjamin Flower. The couple had another daughter, also called Eliza, before their mother died in 1810, leaving two young daughters. 

Her father was a radical journalist, even jailed for his radically dissenting views against the crown. He would be the girl's primary teacher, and they would be socially active and travel in the circles of the likes of John Stuart Mill and Robert Browning.

Sarah would meet and marry William Bridges Adams, and they would fall under the care of the radical Unitarian minister William Johnson Fox, for whom Sarah would write poetry, for which her sister wrote the music. Fox would publish some of these in 1841, but Sarah would die before one of them became one of the most famous hymns in the English language and the source of some controversy. The hymn was “Nearer, My God to Thee,” and the tune you are probably familiar with was written by Lowell Mason in Massachusetts- he of Joy to the World, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, and Mary had a Little Lamb’s fame.

That the words were written by a Unitarian has caused no little bit of strife, with some adding more “evangelical” language and others pointing to the wording about “the cross” and other places in her hymns where she seems quite comfortable with Nicene Orthodoxy.  Its popularity led to a little bit of a hymn battle with Elizabeth Payson Prentice writing “More Love to Thee, O Christ” in the same meter, based on the same text of Genesis 28 (Jacob’s Dream), and both were favorites in times of struggle.

One can sing “Nearer, My God” with purely Orthodox Christian intentions- I’ll leave song choices to those in that world. BUT- the history of Nearer My God To Thee makes it peculiar in its breadth of use.

Was it played by the band on the Titanic as it sank in the Atlantic in 1912? Maybe- the only person to claim that close to the event was one of the earliest to leave and unlikely to hear it- she claimed to have “heard it faintly”- that’s the only credible report. We do have credible reports that it was played at the sinking of the SS Valencia, a now famous ghost ship, that sank 6 years prior. Perhaps that shows bands would play that tune, or the stories were jumbled.

Nonetheless, it became a favorite across denominations and amongst luminaries such as Queen Victoria and her son King Edward VII. It does seem to have been a favorite of President McKinley, and it seems credible to believe that, amongst his last words after being shot and dying of the infection, were from this hymn. Numerous stories are told about the destitute and down and out. It became a favorite of those in the old confederacy, licking their wounds in the aftermath of their losses.

One story is told in various incarnations of the delightful named Enoch Mather Marvin, who was in “exile” having left his congregation in Missouri, having been conscripted to fight for the Union. While in Arkansas, he told the story of being near his end when he heard a woman singing this hymn- she was so poor, but so content, it turned his life around. He would go on to become Bishop of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in New Orleans.

There are various other stories about criminals and other ne’er-do-wells who are transformed by hearing this song in the throes of some naughty deed.  

These kinds of stories are commonly collected and told about beloved hymns- they can be beyond the reach of verification by a historian, but the sheer number of them help key us to the fact that there were few more popular hymns of consolation than the one written by Sarah Flower Adams of Essex- the radical Unitarian whose hymn became an evangelical plea (and whose hymn inspired another, More Love To Thee O Christ)- Sarah Flower Adams died on this, the 14th of August in 1848 from Tuberculosis, she was 43 years old.

The Last word for today comes from the daily lectionary and a good word, a short word and benediction from Psalm 80.

Hear us, Shepherd of Israel,
    you who lead Joseph like a flock.


You who sit enthroned between the cherubim,

    shine forth 2 before Ephraim, Benjamin and Manasseh.


Awaken your might;

    come and save us.

3 Restore us, O God;

    make your face shine on us,

    that we may be saved.

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 14th of August 2025, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man who knows that in 1997’s Titanic they play the Hymn but with Masons tune- with the boat coming from the UK it would have likely been a different tune, popular there… he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who just can’t get into Titanic movies or lore (unless you want to tell me it was a secret Jesuit plot, then I’m in….) I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.