Page:The Methodist Hymn-Book Illustrated.djvu/189

 THE STORY OF THE HYMNS AND THEIR WRITERS 177

Hymn 224. Saviour, we know Thou art. CHARLES WESLEY (i).

Hymns on the Acts of the Apostles (left in MS.); Works t xii. 157. Acts ii. 47. The first and last verses are here omitted. Ver. I reads The Church in ancient days

Was sinners saved from sin, And souls through Jesus grace

Were daily taken in ; Pardon and faith together given Threw open wide the gate of heaven.

The original (ver. 2) reads, The people saved below.

Hymn 225. Sow in the morn thy seed.

JAMES MONTGOMERY (94).

Printed for the Sheffield Sunday School Union, Whitsuntide, 1832, for which he wrote a hymn for nearly forty years ; published in his Poet s Portfolio, 1835, headed The Field of the World. Eccles. xi. 6.

In a letter to Mr. George Bennett, June 16, 1832, Montgomery says that the previous February, on returning from Bath, he and Mr. Rowland Hodgson were travelling between Gloucester and Tewkesbury, when he saw several women and girls working in rows, and was told that they were making holes in the field, into which they dropped two or three seeds. Montgomery had never seen this dibbling before. He said, Give me broadcast sowing, scattering the seed on the right hand and on the left, in liberal handfuls. I fell immediately into a musing fit, and moralized most magnificently upon all kinds of husbandry (though I knew little or nothing of any, but so much the better, perhaps, for my purpose), making out that each was excellent in its way, and best in its place. By degrees my thoughts subsided into verse, and I found them running lines, like furrows, along the field of my imagination : and in the course of the two next stages they had already assumed the form of the following stanzas, which I wrote as soon as we reached Bromsgrove. This is the whole history and mystery of which I fear you have heard so romantic an account.

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