still may I sing;
All glory to God, I’m a child of the King.
Edith Margaret Clarkson
1915-2008
“So Send I You”
Margaret grew up in Toronto, raised by unhappy parents who divorced when she was beginning her teen years. Her memories of childhood were of fear and insecurity. Throughout her life, she was plagued by the pain of migraine headaches, and often bedridden by juvenile arthritis. But she learned to love church hymns and poetry. She published her first poem when she was ten years old. She earned a teacher’s degree and for thirty-eight years she taught elementary school in Ontario. She also served as the music supervisor of six large schools. She loved writing, and for good reason: she was good at it. Her greatest love was writing hymns. She wrote, “Writing a hymn is more than using certain techniques correctly. It is a matter of looking on the face of God.” Over her life, she published seventeen books, hundreds of poems, articles, songs and sketches. At its 1992 national convention, The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada named her a Fellow of the Society in recognition of her prolific works and contribution to hymnody.
She wrote her most notable hymn at age twenty-three. She was an isolated teacher in a gold mining camp in northern Ontario. Her isolation was mental, cultural and spiritual. She said, “Studying the word one night and thinking of the loneliness of my situation, I came to John 20:21 and the words ‘so send I you.’ Because of a physical disability, I could never go to the mission field, and this was where He had sent me.” She wrote the first draft of her hymn. Years later, she revised it to reflect greater acceptance and joy over God’s plan for her.
Elizabeth Cecelia Douglas Clephane
1830-1869
“Beneath the Cross of Jesus”
Born in Edinburgh Scotland, Elizabeth was the daughter of a Scottish lawman. Her early life was full of heartbreak. Both par-ents died when she was a young child and she was often homebound due to her poor health. But she was known for her strong, positive attitude. In fact, her nickname in her hometown was “Sunbeam.” She and her sisters gave all their income, except for that needed for basic needs, to the poor. On the days she could leave home, she made her rounds sharing food and clothing with the poor and tending to those sicker than she.
One afternoon, she considered the essential elements of her faith. Upon opening her Bible, she read Matthew 27:36-37: “And sitting down, they watched him there; and set up over his head his accusation written, ‘This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.’” These verses gave her the vision for the poem to say what Christ meant to her. It was written for her eyes only and stored away. After her death, her family found her poems and published them in 1872. She never heard any of the eight hymns she wrote sung nor did she see them in print.
Anna Louisa Walker Coghill
1836-1907
“Work, for the Night is Coming”
Annie Walker was one of nine children born in Staffordshire, England, but her family moved to the backwoods of Quebec, Canada in 1853. Later, she moved to Ontario, where she founded a private girls’ school with two of her sisters. She closed it when the sisters died. She returned to England about 1863 and in 1884, married a wealthy widower, merchant Harry Coghill, in Staffordshire. During her life, she was prominent as an author and poet, and published five novels and two poetry collections.
Anna wrote “The Night Cometh” when she was eighteen, after her family had moved to Canada, where she had plenty of work to do. It was first published in a Canadian newspaper and later, in her own book, Leaves from the Back Woods, written anonymously in 1861. Ira Sankey set her poem to music and published it as a hymn, “Work, for the Night is Coming” with no attribution to her. When Anna learned of the poem’s inclusion in hymns at a temperance meeting, she tracked down the source and got it corrected. The song has no reference to God, but is based on Jesus’ quote in John 9:4, “I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day; the night cometh, when no man can work.”
Frances Jane ‘Fanny’ Crosby
1820-1915
“All the Way My Savior Leads Me”
“I Am Thine, O Lord”
Volumes have been written about this distant cousin of Bing Crosby and the most prolific hymn writer of all time. The “Queen of American Hymn Writers” and the “Mother of Congregational Singing in America” was born to poor parents, blinded by an incompetent itinerant “doctor” at six weeks of age, and lost her father to death at one year. Her mother and grandmother grounded her in Protestant principles and helped her memorize the first four books of the Old Testament, the Gospels, Proverbs and most of the Psalms. When she was fifteen, New York opened a state school for the blind and she was fortunate to become a student there. She later became one of its teachers until she was about thirty-three years old. She wrote poetry and, while still a student, recited her poetry for visitors, including presidents and generals. In 1843, she went to Washington DC to prove to government leaders that blind people can be educated. As the first woman to speak to the Senate, she won many senators over with her poetry and personality. It’s remarkable that a writer of so many hymns didn’t begin writing hymns until she was about forty. She submitted her first hymn for publication in 1864, but by the time she died at ninety-five, she had composed more than 8000 hymns. At most, she got two dollars for each hymn, because the copyright was either owned by the publisher or the tune writer. Most hymns were written late at night when she had silence to concentrate. In her second career, she was known for her mission work, mainly in the Bowery district in New York City, funded by the income from her writings. In fact, though she had wealthy friends who were willing to support her, she chose to live in tenement houses, giving away any money not needed for essentials. She considered herself primarily as a social worker. Though she married a fellow blind teacher, she kept the use of her maiden name, something quite out of the mainstream at that time. She was also very independent, travelling alone on the train despite her blindness. She was a compelling speaker and even into her nineties, she was speaking to large crowds. “I am so busy I hardly know my name,” she wrote. When a minister once commented it was too bad she couldn’t see, she responded, “If I had been given a choice at birth, I would have asked to be blind. . . for when I get to Heaven, the first face I will see will be the One who died for me.”
Her poems and hymns, ‘songs in the night’ as she called them, were composed in her mind, as many as twelve at once, then dictated to another. She often wrote her hymns under one of 200 pseudonyms or her married name, Mrs. Alexander Van Alstyne, because she was embarrassed by the overwhelming fame and adulation she received. Among the hymns still sung today are “Praise Him, Praise Him,” “Blessed Assurance,” and “Rescue the Perishing.” Her songs drew on experience more than doctrine and framed the backbone of revivalist and evangelical singing.
When she wrote “All the Way My Savior Leads Me,” she expressed her belief in God’s guidance, especially since she was blind. She always felt her blindness was part of God’s plan. The immediate inspiration for the song came from an event in 1874. Lacking money to pay rent, she prayed about it. That day, a stranger came to her door and gave her ten dollars, the very amount she needed. She later wrote “I have no way of accounting for this except to believe that God, in answer
