17. Her Last Great Hymn
17
HER LAST GREAT HYMN
The same month Fanny celebrated her seventieth birthday, Moody came back to New York for his first major campaign since 1876. The decade-and-a-half since he and Sankey had taken New York by storm had produced many changes. Always thickset, Moody had grown stupendously fat. He was so stout he had to have clothes specially made and either wear loafers or have one of his sons tie his shoes. With his enormous white beard and ruddy complexion, he looked remarkably like Santa Claus.
Time had altered not only Moody’s appearance but also his audiences. He no longer had to engage the largest halls, for his middle-aged and elderly listeners could be accommodated at local churches. The fact that most people who attended already were “saved” disappointed the evangelist. He complained bitterly that his meetings were attended only by “chronic attenders of religious meetings, who crowd everybody else out.” He groused that he seemed to be looking at the same faces that had greeted him a decade before.
Sankey did not accompany Moody this time. Although he was not yet fifty, the baritone’s once-golden voice was now almost completely a thing of the past, and he sang only occasionally. Tenor George Stebbins served as soloist and song leader.
In the “Bible readings,” as he called his meetings, Moody spoke of the declining interest of religion in America. The revival that had begun in the 1850s and peaked in the 1870s had completely run its course, and Moody was very concerned. He wondered how religion could be made more palatable to the young. From the pulpit of the Marble Collegiate Church in 1890, he urged ministers to give shorter sermons and inject greater pep into their services. Clergymen, he said, should not take for themselves the pretentious title “Reverend,” for that was reserved for Christ; a minister should be content with “Mister” like any other man.
Fanny attended but predictably refused all Moody’s requests to speak or even appear on the platform. At one of the meetings, however, Fanny was unable to find a seat in the crowded church. She was about to leave when Moody’s son Will told her he would find her a seat. The people were singing “Blessed Assurance” as he led her into the chancel and onto the platform. The evangelist stood up and raised his hand to interrupt the singing. “Praise the Lord, here comes the authoress!” he shouted. It was too late for Fanny to avoid a seat on the platform, and she sat amid a thunderous ovation. She took the incident in good humor.
“PRAISE THE LORD, HERE COMES THE AUTHORESS!” HE SHOUTED.
May brought her to Bridgeport, and on the thirtieth, she addressed a Decoration Day crowd in Seaside Park, reciting a poem written for the local post of the Grand Army of the Republic. The appearance was such a success, she was invited to make it an annual event. For the rest of her life, the Decoration Day poem and address would be an institution in Bridgeport. At ninety, she still could move aging veterans and their families to tears.
The following day, Fanny helped her mother celebrate her ninety-first birthday. Mercy’s birthday was always the high point of the year for her adoring family. Mercy, who lived with Carrie in an apartment on Washington Avenue, was still apparently in good health and in full possession of her faculties. She was joined by a large host of relatives.
That summer Mercy became painfully ill and was taken to a hospital, where her condition was pronounced hopeless. At sunset on September 1, with Fanny, Carrie, and Jule at her bedside, Mercy “passed peacefully from this world to the brighter home above.”
More than the passing of her mother, Fanny was saddened by the conduct of her sisters. Mercy, who had come to Bridgeport a half-century before with nothing, had “a little something” when she died but left no will. Jule and Carrie applied for the estate, declaring themselves the “only heirs and next of kin.” Even if she knew, Fanny did not object, and the courts awarded the two sisters Mercy’s entire estate. Fanny accepted this without bitterness. She felt God provided for her needs, and that was enough.
The next year, Fanny again found her Muse and wrote two hymns that achieved great success. Early that year, Sweney asked her to write “something tender and pathetic.” He proposed, however, a tune that sounded anything but tender and pathetic. It was a peppy, brass bandish piece that sounded very much like “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain.”
Fanny prayed for the appropriate lyrics. Finally, she entered a “train of thought” that resulted in “My Saviour First of All.” Within a few years, almost everyone in England and America knew it.
An even more popular hymn was born shortly thereafter. In March 1891, Fanny’s cousin Howard Crosby, the Presbyterian pastor, died of pneumonia at sixty-five. Not long afterward, Lucius Biglow read her a pamphlet containing the text of Dr. Crosby’s last message. It said no Christian need fear death. “If each of us is faithful to the grace which is given us by Christ, that same grace which teaches us how to live will also teach us how to die.”
Moved by that last message, Fanny wrote a poem called “Some Day.” It was written in a matter of minutes under “divine inspiration,” as she had written her best hymns of the sixties and seventies. She put it in the hands of Biglow, who paid her the usual two dollars and put it in his vault. For three years, “Some Day” seemed destined to be one of those poems Fanny considered among her better efforts but not set to music. But with slight variations, this poem—her “heart’s song”—was to become the well-known “Saved by Grace.”
HER “HEART’S SONG” WAS TO BECOME THE WELL-KNOWN “SAVED BY GRACE.”
Fanny had good reason to reflect on death that year. First, her mother had died, then her cousin, Howard. In July, she received word from Bridgeport that “the White-Robed Angel” had taken her favorite grandniece, Clare Morris, after a bout with scarlet fever. Fanny had not fully recovered from that blow when in September she learned Joseph Knapp had died suddenly aboard ship while returning with Phoebe from a European vacation.
Despite grief and trouble, Fanny was blessed with several excellent friends. There were Ira Sankey, Phoebe Knapp, and Howard Doane. Now, in the 1890s, she began two more great friendships.
At Cornell Methodist Church, she developed a close friendship with the assistant pastor, Rev. Gerhard Johannes Schilling. A native of Germany, Schilling was converted in Burma—a conversion that cost him his job—and came to New York, where he entered divinity school. Forty years her junior, Schilling picked up “Aunt Fanny” in his carriage every Sunday and Wednesday evening for church. He came to know and love her hymns. In 1894, with his American wife, Schilling left for the mission field in Burma, where he translated the Bible and wrote hymns in the native dialect. He claimed Fanny as his inspiration.
Fanny also came to know Eliza Edmunds Hewitt. Born in Philadelphia in 1851, Eliza—sometimes called Lida—had taught for a few years until she was stricken with a painful, incapacitating disease of the spinal cord. After several years in bed, she regained enough strength to become an active church worker. She began to write religious poems that attracted the attention of William Kirkpatrick, who, along with Sweney, set some of them to music. As the years went by, Eliza supplied fifteen hundred hymns for Kirkpatrick and Sweney. By the mid-nineties, she was one of the grand duchesses in the court of Fanny Crosby, the acknowledged queen of the gospel hymn.
In 1894, Stebbins was given the opportunity to set Fanny’s “heart’s song” to music. Fanny was spending the summer with the Sankeys in Northfield, Massachusetts. The Moodys were in Europe that summer, and the Northfield Bible conference was headed by Dr. Adoniram Judson Gordon, an eminent Baptist clergyman and writer. One of his lectures was on the subject of the Holy Spirit. After his address, Sankey came to Fanny and asked, “Will you say something? There is a request from the audience that you speak.”
“Oh, Sankey, I cannot speak before such an array of talent!”
Gordon then added, “Fanny, do you speak to please man or to please God?”
That pricked her conscience. “Why, I hope to please God!”
“Well, then,” said Gordon, “go out and do your duty.”
Taking her position at the lectern, Fanny made a few remarks, then quoted her “heart’s song,” the poem “Some Day.” It began:
Some day my earthly house will fall,
I cannot tell how soon ’twill be,
But this I know, my All in All
Has now a place in heaven for me.
When she had finished, there was not a dry eye in the auditorium.
Sankey sent the poem to Stebbins, who had Fanny provide a chorus:
And I shall see Him face to face,
And tell the story—Saved by Grace.
He set it to a slow tune. Although the music is not particularly delicate or melodic, Fanny’s “heart’s song” became a favorite among evangelical Christians the world over. Moody loved it as soon as he heard it. A hit song of the Gay Nineties, it was on everybody’s lips.
FANNY’S “HEART’S SONG” BECAME A FAVORITE AMONG EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS THE WORLD OVER.
It was to be Fanny’s last truly popular hymn.