13. Home Missions
13
HOME MISSIONS
Any hopes Fanny may have entertained of collaborating with Philip Bliss were dashed forever shortly after Christmas 1876. Bliss and his wife, en route to join an evangelical campaign in Chicago, perished in a train wreck.
The death of Bliss, who was just thirty-eight, “cast a cloud” over Fanny’s spirit. Soon she and her colleagues at Biglow and Main were editing his last hymns, a publishing venture jointly undertaken with John Church in Cincinnati. Many of the hymns were incomplete poems that his partner, Major Whittle, sadly undertook to finish. The collection was published in 1877.
Fanny did not confine her literary efforts to sacred songs. She wrote poems to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and other events, and she continued to write secular songs. Although she had grown increasingly religious over the past two decades, she still enjoyed writing love lyrics.
At her speaking engagements, which often took her away from New York, her talks were like her hymns: simple, direct, and personal. This quality of intimacy, combined with the love and joy she came to radiate in midlife, made her a popular speaker. On some occasions, lines of people reportedly wrapped around an entire city block, hoping to get in.
Fanny would take the podium with her famous greeting: “God bless your dear hearts! I’m so happy to be with you!” She always held a little book, which many thought contained notes in Braille but which only served, she confided, to give her security. She would say something like this:
My friends, I am shut out of the world, and shut in with my Lord! I have served Him as I could. As I have listened to the remarks made tonight [by the person who introduced her], I have thought, “Not unto me, O Lord, but unto Thee, be all the glory!” The Lord is the sunshine of my soul. I do not want to live for myself, but for Him. I remember my grandmother, as I knelt by her chair in which she rocked me to sleep and taught me to pray that if it was His will, to give me what I wanted, but if the Lord did not want me to have the things, it is best not to.
My friends, it is so good to be loved! Loved by God’s own people! The memory of this meeting will never fade from my mind! When I go home and look into my Father’s face and see the sunshine of His smile, my feelings will be like the tender affection and gratitude that glows in my heart now for you.
Short, rambling, but sincere and inspiring—such was the character of her addresses. She almost always recited one or more of her poems and sometimes would compose one spontaneously for the occasion. She always closed with the Mizpah benediction: “May the Lord watch between me and thee, when we are absent, one from the other.”
She radiated an aura of warmth, of holiness—something that transcended the brevity and simplicity of her remarks and was enough to incite people from all walks of life to stand all day in stifling heat or bitter cold to hear her. She could cheer the despondent, arouse the lukewarm to a greater sense of commitment, and inspire the agnostic to make the decision for Christ. Although she spoke to smaller audiences than some of her friends because she insisted on minimal publicity, in many ways she was becoming one of the most effective evangelists of her day.
SHE RADIATED AN AURA OF WARMTH, OF HOLINESS.
Though small and somewhat delicate, Fanny had boundless energy and was never seriously ill. Even in extreme old age, she would tire out people twenty to thirty years younger. But even she needed a vacation at least once a year, so in the summer of 1877, she attended the Methodist Episcopal Church camp meeting at Ocean Grove, New Jersey. It was founded by pastors from New York, Philadelphia, and Trenton who sought a summer resort “free from the fashion and folly” of most amusement parks. Along with recreation, they wanted to be able to hold religious exercises. The faithful could come to swim, fish, and wander along the beach but also to hear the Word of God proclaimed in three or more services each day. Preachers of all denominations spoke at Ocean Grove. The vacationers rented tents that were often so small one was obliged to enter on hands and knees.
Fanny had never had the money to rent an Ocean Grove tent, but in 1877, she attended as an “honored guest” of friends, probably the Knapps. She made the two-hour trip by train, alone. As usual, she made friends on the train, and a kind passenger escorted her to her friends’ tent.
The highlight of the camp meeting was the evening Surf Meeting. At sunset, the faithful trooped down to the beach to be led in a moving vesper service. Although she could see but a few faint hues of the sunset, Fanny was just as moved as her sighted friends.
Here she made some important contacts. The song leader was John Robson Sweney. A stout, balding man with heavy-lidded eyes, mustache, and goatee, Sweney was well known as both band leader and hymn writer. Born in 1837, Sweney had studied vocal music and had been in charge of a regimental band during the Civil War. Afterward, he organized Sweney’s Cornet Band in Philadelphia and taught music at the Pennsylvania Music Academy.
A Presbyterian, Sweney led the singing at a number of evangelical camp meetings around the country. Specializing in light, bouncy, rollicking tunes, he had composed popular hymns and published several hymnals, which included poems by Fanny. Now he met her for the first time and asked her to supply the words for more of his tunes.
So did William James Kirkpatrick, Sweney’s friend and colleague. A happy, vivacious, warm man born in Pennsylvania in 1838, Kirkpatrick had been trained in vocal music, the pipe organ, harmony, theory, and composition. The “Professor,” as he was called, was much better trained as a musician than many of his hymn-writing contemporaries. In Philadelphia, he had become a successful furniture dealer, composing music on the side. He recently had joined Sweney in publishing hymn books for a Philadelphia firm.
Fanny, with her strong sense of humor, much enjoyed the company of “Kirkie.” She would supply Sweney and Kirkpatrick with nearly a thousand hymns for the books they edited. Also during this period, Fanny began to supply Sankey with poems for his Gospel Hymns, which in the next decade would run to six volumes.
About this time in New York, Fanny met still another composer: a six-foot, gaunt man with pince-nez spectacles and a neat goatee. Quiet, gentle, and restrained, George Coles Stebbins was unlike the gregarious Kirkpatrick. Born on a farm in Orleans County, New York, in 1846, Stebbins as a musician was largely self-taught, but he acquired a considerable reputation as a choirmaster when, in 1876, Moody called him to evangelistic work. Stebbins readily responded and was paired with a preacher named George Pentecost.
Over the next few decades, Stebbins would set many of Fanny’s poems to music. He did not always do a good job; his style was sometimes monotonous, awkward, and unmelodic. However, he did write some very appealing hymn tunes. With Fanny, he wrote “Jesus Is Calling” and “Saved by Grace.”
By this time, Fanny had created most of her most famous hymns. In nine years, she had written “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,” “Blessed Assurance,” “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Saviour,” “Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross,” “I Am Thine, O Lord,” “All the Way My Saviour Leads Me,” “Close to Thee,” “Praise Him! Praise Him!,” “To God Be the Glory,” “Every Day and Hour,” and “Rescue the Perishing.” In later years, with two or three possible exceptions, none of her hymns would equal these in popularity.
Why was this? Had she burned out?
Most likely, yes. Fanny Crosby had said everything she had to say. Almost everything she would produce henceforth would paraphrase something written earlier.
But she was by no means washed up as a hymn writer. Even her paraphrases gained moderate popularity and often were superior to the lyrics of many contemporaries. She was in ever-increasing demand as a lyricist.
The fact that her current hymns were not as popular as earlier ones did not trouble Fanny. She knew she was doing the Lord’s work and felt certain her hymns would be helpful to some people. If they led just one person to Christ, she would be content.
THE FACT THAT HER CURRENT HYMNS WERE NOT AS POPULAR AS EARLIER ONES DID NOT TROUBLE FANNY.
What did bother her was that some of what she considered to be her best poems were not set to music. She often complained that her musician friends ignored her best and set to music her worst lyrics. Unfortunately, few of these unused lyrics have survived. Those which have were clearly too complicated to be treated adequately by the musicians who usually worked with her. The lyrics would not have made “music for the masses.”
In the spring of 1879, Frances Havergal, Fanny’s friend by correspondence, fell ill and died in Wales at forty-two. Fanny was nearly sixty and had outhved both friends—Philip Bliss and Frances—who, with her, had spearheaded the lyrical wing of the gospel hymn movement. Their premature deaths left Fanny unrivaled as the “queen of gospel hymn writers,” as she now was known. Until her death, Fanny would be the patron saint of hymnody for evangelical Protestants.
She made regular trips to Bridgeport, where her mother and sisters lived. Mercy Morris, alert and vigorous at eighty, lived with her daughter Carolyn. Fanny’s other sister, Julia, lived nearby, working as a dressmaker to support her disabled husband, Byron.
Fanny at sixty was more active than most men or women at forty. She recently had begun what became a second career, parallel to her hymn writing, as a home mission worker. She now spent several days a week in the missions of New York’s Bowery district.