My Faith Looks Up to Thee

Ray Palmer was twenty-two, lonely and worn out from a year of teaching and illness in New York, when he wrote these lines one night in his boarding room, not intending a hymn at all — just pouring out his own heart's need. He copied them into a little notebook and told no one.

Two years later he met the composer Lowell Mason on a Boston street; Mason asked if he had anything for a hymnbook, and Palmer handed over the notebook page. Mason set it to music and told him: Mr. Palmer, you may live many years and do many good things, but I think you will be best known to posterity as the author of My Faith Looks Up to Thee. He was right.

The hymn is faith at the end of its own resources, looking away from itself to Christ: my faith looks up to Thee, Thou Lamb of Calvary, Saviour divine. It asks for grace to take away the load of sin, for zeal to inspire a fainting heart, and at last for a guide through the dark valley: when ends life's transient dream, when death's cold, sullen stream shall o'er me roll... O bear me safe above, a ransomed soul.