p. 11 | Our First Hymn-Book

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 7, 1910

Our First Hymn-Book.

—In the Present Truth for December, 1849, it was announced that a small forty-eight-page collection of hymns was on the press. The title-page of this little book reads, “Hymns for God’s Peculiar People, that keep the Commandments of God and the Faith of Jesus, compiled by James White, Oswego, 1849.” It contained fifty-three hymns, without notes. There were a few Sabbath hymns, most of which have found place in our “Hymns and Tunes,” and a few of the old familiar hymns commonly classified as devotional; but the greater number were hymns of the advent hope and of the eternal home. Some are unfamiliar to most of us, as this old-time “glory song:”—

“I’m glad I know that Christ shall reign In glory, glory, glory, And come to earth in clouds again, In glory, glory, glory. ’Tis glory’s foretaste makes me sing Of glory, glory, glory; And to my Saviour praises bring, Sing glory, glory, glory.”

The call, “Come out of her, my people,” was sung in the vigorous lines,— “Then blow ye the trumpet in pure testimony, And let the saints hear it again; O come ye from Babylon, Egypt, and Sodom, And make your way over the plain. Come, wash all your robes in the blood of the Lamb.”

The political upheavals and unrest in Europe in those days, really the beginning of the arming of the nations, gave timely force to a hymn of the coming conflict,— “The cry is up, the strife begun, The struggle of the mighty ones; And Armageddon’s day comes on, The carnival of Slaughter’s sons; War lifts his helmet to his brow: O God, protect thy people now!”

One hymn of the 1844 movement would be considered as having too much the character of a narrative for a hymn, but it told a heart-stirring story:— “Hail, partners in the advent band! Your race is almost run; God’s led you with his own right hand, Since looking for his Son. All hail, ye loved ones of my God, Come listen to my song, While I recount the steps we’ve trod, Nor shall the strain be long.”

It tells how,— “In forty-three each took his lamp, Went forth to meet the Lord;”— and how, after the first time passed, the “midnight cry” roused all to look for the coming King on the “tenth day of the seventh month,” in 1844. Then came the bitter disappointment,— “Our longing eyes were raised in vain To meet him in the air.”

But the hymn points those who passed through that experience to the fact that the coming to judgment for which they looked was not the second advent of Christ to this world, but his coming before the Ancient of Days, in the most holy of the heavenly sanctuary,— “There to the fair Jerusalem Unseen by mortal eye, Jesus our King and Priest did come, Thus answering to the cry.”

In 1852 a second hymn-book was printed in Rochester, N. Y., with many more hymns. However rough the way, the believers have cheered it with song, and so it must ever be; for “the redeemed of the Lord shall return, and come with singing unto Zion.”