1. Almost A Saint
1
ALMOST A SAINT
The year is 1910. The place is Perth Amboy, New Jersey. A cab driver stops his horses to pick up two passengers: a middle-aged clergyman and a withered old woman, apparently blind, ravaged, and wasted almost beyond belief, bent nearly double with age. But as the coach jolts along to the railroad depot, the hackman becomes aware of something unusual about this ancient woman. She speaks to the clergyman in a voice not dry and quavering, but clear and high, mellow and young. Far from senile, the lady’s mind is as fresh and young as her voice. She evidently is a woman of great intellect and refinement. She and the clergyman are discussing some point of theology. The coachman, paying more attention to what she is saying than to the road, listens intently to the wit and wisdom of the elderly lady.
“This is Fanny Crosby, the hymn writer,” the minister informs him.
The hackman is stunned. He takes off his hat and weeps openly. At the depot, he hails a policeman. “This is Miss Fanny Crosby, who wrote ‘Safe in the Arms of Jesus.’ I want you to help this young man get her safely to the train.”
The policeman, too, is stunned. “I sure will!” Falteringly, he adds to the woman, “We sang your hymn ‘Safe in the Arms of Jesus’ last week, at my little girl’s funeral.”
He looks at the ground with reddened, shining eyes. “Aunt Fanny” takes his enormous arm in her skinny hands and says, with great feeling and tenderness, “My boy, I call all policemen and railroad men ‘my boys’; they take such good care of me wherever I go. God bless your dear heart! You shall have my prayers. And tell your dear wife that your dear little girl is ‘safe in the arms of Jesus.’ ”
The constable weeps openly.
Who was Fanny Crosby, this strange little woman dressed in the style of seventy years before, with the green glasses and the crucifix on her breast? Who was this blind woman whose name was so revered by people on the street?
Today, she often is remembered as the author of mawkish Victorian hymns, trite and hackneyed. Among many liberal-minded clergy, her name is a byword for bad church music and bad theology; she seems to them to have been a neurotic woman of syrupy literary bent.
And that’s if she’s remembered at all. For most people, the name Fanny Crosby conjures up an absolute blank.
Was she indeed simply a third-rate hack poet whose fame justly faded generations ago? Or was she more than we realize today, someone whose life story is worth retelling? Did she make a significant contribution to American society, or was she overrated in her day?
How different was the place of Fanny Crosby in the estimation of our forebears! Far from being the epitome of a bad hymn writer, Fanny Crosby in her day was considered the greatest in America. Johann Strauss reigned as the waltz king in Vienna and John Philip Sousa the march king in Washington; Fanny Crosby reigned as the hymn queen in New York during the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Charles H. Gabriel (1856–1932), himself a noted hymn writer and author of several popular songs, at her death lamented the loss of the woman whose “name, suspended as a halo above modern hymnology…will live on as long as people sing the Gospel.” William Alfred Quayle (1860–1925), a Methodist bishop, poet, and theologian, called her the “modern Saint Cecelia.” George Coles Stebbins (1846–1945), a prominent hymn writer and evangelical singer, attributed all his success as a hymn tune composer to the poetry of the men and women who supplied him with verse, especially to his beloved “Aunt Fanny.” He wrote in 1905, “The most distinguishing thing about my life has been my friends, Fanny Crosby, and Moody and Sankey….They have made me what I am.”
FANNY CROSBY REIGNED AS THE HYMN QUEEN DURING THE LATTER NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES.
In his 1924 autobiography, Stebbins wrote, “There was probably no writer in her day who appealed more to the valid experience of the Christian life or who expressed more sympathetically the deep longings of the human heart than Fanny Crosby.” In 1904, the well-known singing evangelist, Ira D. Sankey, partner and colleague of D. L. Moody, said the success of their evangelical campaigns resulted largely from Fanny Crosby’s hymns.
During the era (1870–1920) of the “gospel song,” a light, informal hymn written in the style of the popular ballad, Fanny Crosby reigned supreme. Her hymns were sung all over the world. During an evangelical campaign in the British Isles, Sankey took a short vacation to the Swiss Alps, where he was astounded to hear peasants singing, beneath the window of his inn, Fanny Crosby’s “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Saviour” in German. That hymn was said to have been a favorite of Queen Victoria and the Prince and Princess of Wales. “Safe in the Arms of Jesus” was played by a brass band at the funeral of President Grant in 1885 and, the same year, was sung at the funeral of Lord Shaftsbury, a founder of the YMCA. During the early 1900s, an American clergyman traveling through the Arabian desert was amazed to hear Bedouins in their tents singing “Saved by Grace,” presumably in Arabic.
But Fanny was known for more than her hymns. She was one of the three most prominent figures in American evangelical religious life in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (Moody and Sankey were the others). She was famous as a preacher and lecturer and was a devoted home-mission worker. Many times when she spoke at a church, people would be lined up for at least a block before the service began. She was venerated as practically a living saint in her later years; in fact, she was called “the Protestant saint” or “the Methodist saint.” When she was at home, she was a virtual “prisoner of the confessional” for the scores of people who came from all over the world to seek her advice and prayers.
SHE WAS CALLED “THE PROTESTANT SAINT.”
In her ninety-five years, Fanny Crosby wrote approximately nine thousand hymns—more than anyone else in recorded Christian history—and more than a thousand secular poems. She was noted for her concerts on harp and organ. To our grandparents and great-grandparents, she was revered.
The popular congregational and Sunday school hymn originated with her generation of hymn writers, of whom she was the chief example. Before then, many hymns were staid, formal, and rather cold. Fanny and her colleagues worked to develop a kind of hymn, in the popular idiom, that appealed to the emotions of the worshipper. In this sense, she can be considered the grandmother of latter-day pop hymns and praise songs. In fact, she may be regarded as the grandmother of all hymns that address the personal feelings and emotions of the singers, all hymns written in the popular vein.
This is the story of a woman of humble origins, blind almost from birth, who achieved fame as a poet, educator, and musician before becoming known throughout the English-speaking world as a hymn writer and, finally, almost as a saint.