Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing

Robert Robinson was apprenticed to a London barber at fourteen, fell in with a gang, and went one evening in 1752 to heckle the preacher George Whitefield. Whitefield's text was O generation of vipers — and the arrow lodged. After three years of dread, Robinson found peace, and at twenty-two, now a young Methodist preacher, he wrote this hymn of gratitude.

Its most famous image is the Ebenezer — here I raise mine Ebenezer — from 1 Samuel 7, where Samuel set up a stone saying, hitherto hath the LORD helped us. The hymn is a memorial stone in music: grace has brought me safe thus far, streams of mercy never ceasing, and a heart tuned like an instrument to sing of it.

Its staying power lies in its honesty: prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love. Robinson himself wandered — his later theology drifted, and a famous (if unverifiable) story has a woman on a stagecoach quoting the hymn to him, and Robinson replying that he was the poor man who wrote it, and would give a thousand worlds to feel it again. The hymn's own answer stands ready: here's my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.