O Love That Wilt Not Let
Me Go - A Fruit of Pain
#432
O Love, that wilt not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in Thee;
I give Thee back the life I owe,
That in Thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.
O Light, that followest all my way,
I yield my flickering torch to Thee;
My heart restores its borrowed ray,
That in Thy sunshine's blaze its day
May brighter, fairer be.
O Joy, that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to Thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain
That morn shall tearless be.
O Cross, that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from Thee;
I lay in dust life's glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.
This hymn is one of my favourite ones.
The tune written by Dr. A.L. Peace is
outstandingly beautiful while adapted to the unusual metre of the
lines...
Despite the fooling, outward circumstances the reality is always
there.
Love, Light, Joy, and Cross are being personified here.
What kind of experience moved the author to write such an
experientially profound hymn?
Well, according to traditionally considered origin this hymn was
written after
author's being ill-treated by his fiancee. Due to the accident
that caused author to
become blind, the woman he was engaged with broke off the compact
and left him in this
painful state.
The author is Dr George Matheson, theologian and minister,
and the story of the losing of his sight is true,
yet this was not the moment in which he wrote this beautiful
hymn.
W.J. Limmer Sheppard in his "Great Hymns and their
Stories" p. 119 informs:
(...)"the story is purely imaginery, inspired, no doubt, by
the phraseology of the hymn,
and by the knowledge that Dr. Matheson had lost his sight. The
writer has been recently
assured by Dr. Matheson's sister that the story of these
circumstances is entirely
unfounded. As a matter of fact, Dr. Matheson became blind in his
youth, while the hymn
was not written until 1882, when he was forty years of age. At
that time,
Miss Matheson says, he had sustained a sad bereavement, and that
it was whilst alone
and brooding over his sorrow that the words were suddenly
suggested to him, and were,
to use his own expression,'the inspiration of the moment'. The
lines were written
on a summer evening, in the Manse at Innellan, Argyllshire, the
parish
of which Dr. Matheson was minister. The author himself said of
his hymn:'It was composed
with extreme rapidity; it seemed to me that its construction only
occupied a few minutes,
and I felt myself rather in the position of one who was being
dictated to than of an
original artist. I was suffering from extreme mental distress,
and the hymn was
the fruit of the pain.'"
May we all while being distressed, suppressed, oppressed and in
pain learn the lesson
how to enjoy the richness of God's Love, Light and Joy leading to
the pain-relieving Cross.
FSS
(This hymn can be found in the "Hymns" by Living Stream Ministry
#432 p. 390)