The Reverend Dudley Atkins Tyng was an ardent opponent of slavery, but the majority of his congregation in the Epiphany Episcopal Church in Philadelphia were slaveowners, and they forced his resignation. However, he was induced to continue his revivalist preaching in Jayne’s Hall, and had great success. One Sunday in 1858 he preached to an audience of 5,000 people; more than 1,000 of them signed a pledge indicating their conversion. The following Wednesday, Tyng was in the country looking at a piece of farm machinery when his sleeve was accidently caught in the cogs. His arm was dragged into the machine and torn off, the serious injuries proving fatal. Knowing his end was near, sent a last message to the Young Men’s Christian Association in Philadelphia, “Tell them to stand up for Jesus,” possibly thinking of Psalm 94:16, “Who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity?” His friend George Duffield, a Presbyterian minister, was inspired by Tyng’s dying words, and wrote this hymn as an exhortation, using it in the funeral sermon preached the following Sunday, April 25.

Duffield was born on September 12, 1818, at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Yale with a B.A. in 1837, and from the Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1840. He entered the Presbyterian ministry and between 1840 and 1884 served in churches in New York City, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Michigan, and Illinois. For some years he edited the Presby- terian Christian Observer; Knox College granted him an honorary D.D. degree in 1871. He retired in 1884 to Bloomfield, New Jersey, where he had been a minister from 1847 to 1852, and died there on July 6, 1888.

The tune WEBB commemorates George James Webb, who composed it in 1837 while on a voyage from England to America, as a setting for a secular song beginning, “”Tis dawn, the lark is singing.” It was printed in Mason and Webb’s Cantica Laudis, 1850, and named GOODWIN there, although it appeared earlier in 1837 in a Boston collection, The Odeon, to the above. It was set to a hymn text “The Morning Light Is Breaking” in 1842 in The Wesleyan Psalmist; the tune carries the name MORNING LIGHT in some hymnals. The hymn as it now stands first appeared in a hymnal in the Church Psalmist, 1859.

Webb was born on June 24, 1803, at Rushmore House, near Salisbury, the son of a farmer. He studied music and was organist at Falmouth in Cornwall, but in 1830 emigrated to the United States and became an organist in Boston. Here he associated with Lowell Mason (see Biographies) in the founding of the Boston Academy of Music, and he was professor of secular music there. He became a Swedenborgian in 1835. From 1840 to 1843 he was president of the Boston Handel and Haydn Society. He moved to Orange 1870, then in 1876 to New York City, where he taught singing. He was noted as a choral conductor and an orchestral teacher; he composed several anthems and hymn tunes. He retired to Orange, New Jersey, in 1885 and died there on October 7, 1887.

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