Rock of Ages

Augustus Toplady was converted at sixteen in an Irish barn, listening to an uneducated lay preacher — a circumstance he loved to recount against every notion that God needs impressive means. He became a Church of England clergyman in Devon, and one of the age's most combative defenders of salvation by grace alone.

Tradition says the hymn was born when Toplady sheltered from a storm in a cleft of the limestone gorge at Burrington Combe in the Mendips — a rock of ages literally split for him. Whatever the truth of the story, the hymn's logic is unmistakably his: nothing in the sinner's hands, everything in Christ's wounds. Could my zeal no respite know, could my tears for ever flow, all for sin could not atone: thou must save, and thou alone.

He published it in 1776 in The Gospel Magazine, appended — with characteristic edge — to an article calculating that a man sinning every second would owe an unpayable debt of millions of sins, the point being that only an infinite payment avails. Toplady died of tuberculosis two years later, thirty-eight years old, testifying that he was the happiest man in the world. The hymn has been sung at gravesides ever since: while I draw this fleeting breath, when mine eyes shall close in death.