News, Hymn History, & Resources

      With 980 selections in Psalms and Hymns and Spiritual Songs, some are bound to be unfamiliar. These little-known songs are well worth taking...

       Philip Doddridge was grandson of one John Doddridge of England, the latter of whom had been ejected from the established church by the Act...

Lyricist Sarah Adams, though a shortened life of fragile health, lived forty-three productive years. She was widely known for literary and other a...

Louisa immigrated to the United States as a young adult, living in Cincinnati, Ohio. There she married Mr. Stead, and the two were blessed with a daughter named Lily. When the daughter was but four years old, while vacationing at New York's Long Island Sound, Mr. Stead responded to the peril of a drowning young lad.

“George Hinsdale, composer of psalm tune “Hinsdale,” died while his daughter was very young. With an additional loss of her mother, Phoebe was orp...

Psalm 100:2Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing.Though desiring to study musick, McGranahan's father discouraged the...

      The year was 1756 and a young man of England visited his mother in Ireland. While there, he attended evangelistic services being held in a ba...

     This story of trial and faith occurred in recent years, proving that the 'old hymns of the faith' still have power in the life of believers in our modern age. Most songs, most speeches are put to silence in the face of deep pain, but hymns? Hymns have the power to comfort, calm, strengthen, and point upward the heart that longs to please Him in every scene of life.

Mr. Black served as a teacher of singing schools and editor of many gospel songbooks. One of the titles, Songs of the Soul, 1894, sold more than four hundred thousand copies wherein these lines were first published and became widely accepted. Black records the origin of the lines as follows:

In times of success, Anne found that Christ was all that could satisfy. In times of loss, she found he was all upon which to rely.

"An old inn keeper in England, who had often swore that he would never attend church, heard of the choice music, and of the crowds attracted by it, and so resolved, one Sunday afternoon, to go and hear the singing, but not to hear one word of the sermon.

As originally printed, it had four verses, of which the following was the second. As it is generally omitted we insert it herewith: –