THE STORY OF THE HYMNS AND THEIR WRITERS 395
was made Protestant Episcopal Bishop of the Western Diocese of New York.
This hymn was begun on Good Friday, 1850, and com pleted in 1851 in the grounds of Magdalen College, Oxford It was published in Verses for 1851, in Commemoration of the Third Jubilee of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, edited by the Rev. Ernest Hawkins. It is one of the finest of our missionary hymns. Bishop Coxc published several volumes of poetry.
Hymn 709. The heathen perish; day by clay. JAMES MONTGOMERY (94).
First printed in the Sheffield Iris, of which Montgomery was proprietor and editor, April 20, 1824. In his Christian Psalmist, 1825, it is headed Christian Responsibility.
Hymn 770. From Greenland s icy mountains.
REGINALD HF.DKK, D.D. (28).
On Whit Sunday, 1819, Dr. Shipley, Vicar of Wrcxham and Dean of St. Asaph, preached in Wrexham Church in aid of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, on behalf of whose Eastern missions a Royal Letter had just been issued authorizing collections in every church. A course of Sunday evening lectures also began the same day in Wrexham Church, and Heber was to give the first lecture. Dean Shipley, his father-in-law, asked Heber on the Saturday to write something for them to sing in the morning. 1 Heber moved from the table where the dean and a few friends were sitting to a distant part of the room. After a little time the dean asked, What have you written? Heber read the first three verses. There, there, that will do very well, was the comment. No, no, the sense is not complete, was the poet s reply. He wrote the fourth verse, but the dean would not listen, when he begged, Let me add another ; oh, let me add another. All was done in twenty minutes. It is said to have been sung next morning in Wrexham Church to an old ballad tune, Twas when the seas were roaring. The hymn was published in the Evangelical Magazine, 1822, and in the Christian Observer, February, 1823. The original MS. was long in the possession of Dr.
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