James Edmeston wrote this hymn in 1829 after reading Salte’s Travels in Abyssinia, in which he noted particularly the Ethiopian hymn sung at the end of the day. Over his two eight-line stanzas, now changed to four four-line ones, he wrote the quotation “At night their short evening hymn, “Jesus, forgive us,’ stole through the camp.” While some lines are almost direct quotations from Psalm 91, a summary of the hymn is expressed in Psalm 139:12: “Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee.” The last line has been changed from the original “May the morn in heaven awake us” in order to accord better with the doctrine of death’s being a sleep until the resurrection at the second advent of Christ.

Edmeston was born in Wapping, east London, on September 10, 1791. He was trained to be an architect and surveyor, into which profession he entered in 1816 and remained all his life. A great lover of children, he visited often and supported the London Orphan Asylum. Although born into a family of Independent antecedents, he joined the Church of England. He used to write a hymn every Sunday to be read in the home for family worship. In all, he wrote about 2000 hymns, many of them for children, and they were assembled into about a dozen collections. Edmeston died at Homerton, east London, on January 7, 1867.

The tune EVENING PRAYER, or SUNSET, was composed in 1876 by George Coles Stebbins (1846-1945; see Biographies) as a response to be sung after prayer by his choir at the Boston Tremont Temple. The tune was used for Edmeston’s words in 1878. It is a tune suitable for trained singers, for each of the four parts carries a melody of its own.