Page:McClure's Magazine v9 n3 to v10 no2.djvu/556

178 Mr. Gladstone has translated it into Latin, Greek, and Italian. Dr. Pusey declared it to be "the most deservedly popular hymn, perhaps the very favorite." The followers of Wesley, against whom the hymn was originally launched as a light missile in the polemical combat, seized it for their collection and mutilated it the while—why, does not clearly appear. The unfortunate Armenians who were butchered the other day in Constantinople sang a translation of "Rock of Ages," which, indeed, has made the tour of the world, side by side with the Bible and the "Pilgrim's Progress." It is recorded that General Stuart, the dashing cavalry leader of the Southern Confederacy, sang the hymn with his dying strength, as his life slowly ebbed away from the wounds he had received in the battles before Richmond. When the "London" went down in the Bay of Biscay, January 11th, 1866, the last thing which the last man who left the ship heard as the boat pushed off from the doomed vessel was the voices of the passengers singing "Rock of Ages." "No other English hymn can be named which has laid so broad and firm a grasp on the English-speaking world."

When I asked the Duke of Argyll as to hymns which had helped him, he replied:

Of this hymn and the way it has helped men, Mr. S. R. Crockett writes as follows: "One hymn I love, and that (to be Irish) is not a hymn, but what in our country is mystically termed a 'paraphrase.' It is that which, when sung to the tune of St. Paul's, makes men and women square themselves and stand erect to sing, like an army that goes gladly to battle."

This was the favorite hymn of Dr. Livingstone. It cheered him often in his African wanderings, and when his remains were buried in Westminster Abbey it was sung over his grave.

A Scotch mission-teacher at Kuruman, Bechuanaland, South Africa, writes: "This hymn stands out preëminently as the hymn which has helped me beyond all others. It shines with radiant lustre like the star that outshineth all others among the midnight constellations. It has been my solace and comfort in times of trouble, my cheer in times of joy; it is woven into the warp and woof of my spiritual being; its strains were the first I was taught to lisp, and, God helping me, they shall be the last. Sung to the tune of 'Dundee,' that was the refrain of happy meetings or sad partings. Its strains rang out the Old Year and heralded in the New. It was chanted as a farewell dirge when I left my home in Scotland. It has followed me 'Sooth the line,' and every gait I gang, I never rest until from dusky throats roll out the familiar words. It is a 'couthy' psalm, and touches to the quick the human spirit that more gifted utterances fail to reach. I am penning this in the little room that was once the study of David Livingstone, whose walls have often reëchoed to many a strain of praise and supplication, but to none more inspiring and endearing than 'O God of Bethel. Another Scotchman writes: "In some ways I have wandered far from the faith of our fathers, but the old Psalms move me strongly yet. 'O God of Bethel, by whose hand' will ever have a pathetic interest for me. I, too, have crooned it as a cradle song over one who will never need to hear me croon it ever more, for she has solved the riddle of the ages, which I am left painfully trying to spell. These rugged lines speak out the religious experiences of a rugged race as no modern hymns ever will."