Somerset Thomas Corry Lowry was born in Dublin, Ireland, on March 21, 1855, educated at Cambridge University, and ordained in the church of England in 1879. Serving a number of churches in England, he was at North Holmwood, near Dorking in Surrey, in 1893 when he wrote this thought-provoking stewardship hymn. It was printed in the Christian Social Union Hymn Book, 1895. Lowry authored several inspirational books, including Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 1910. He died at Torquay, Devonshire,on January 29, 1932.

Ralph Vaughan Williams (see Biographies) gets the credit for bringing this Dutch folk song into use as a hymn tune. He got it from Julius Röntgen’s Old Dutch Peasant Songs and Country Dances Transcribed for the Piano, London, 1912, and set it to “See the Conqueror Mounts in Triumph,” by Christopher Wordsworth in the English Hymnal, 1906. He used Röntgen’s harmonization, which SDAH changed only slightly, making the note values quarters and eighths instead of halves and quarters. The tune had been published in Amsterdam earlier (about 1710) in a book of some 1,000 melodies without accompaniment.

Julius Röntgen (1855-1932) was a distinguished Dutch pianist, composer, conductor, teacher, and editor who knew personally Franz Liszt, Brahms, and Edvard Grieg. He was born on May 9, 1855, in Leipzig, Germany, and died in his fatherland at Utrecht on September 13, 1932.

📖 Reference: Companion to the Seventh-day Adventist Hymnal by Wayne Hooper and Edward E. White. Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1988.