Maltbie Davenport Babcock was a gifted and powerful Presbyterian preacher, an athlete, and a great lover of nature. During his first pastorate at Lockport, New York, in the early 1880s, he used to take early-morning walks, saying, “I’m going out to be in my Father’s world.” He wrote a 16-stanza poem, each first line beginning “This is my Father’s world,” first published after his death, in Thoughts for Everyday Living, 1901.

Babcock was born in Syracuse, New York, on August 3, 1858. He graduated from the university there in 1875 and proceeded to the Auburn Theological Seminary to train for the Presbyterian ministry. He was ordained, and during his first appointment at Lockport wrote this hymn. He was transferred to Baltimore in 1887 and served in the Brown Memorial Church for 14 years. His next appointment was to the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City, where he ministered for only a year and a half. He died in Naples, Italy, on May 18, 1901, while on a visit to the Holy Land.

TERRA BEATA (Blessed Land) was composed in 1915 by Franklin Lawrence Sheppard and appears in Alleluia, the Presbyterian Sunday school hymnal of 1915, which Sheppard edited. It is given there as a “traditional English melody”because he had memories of learning it from his mother when he was a child. It could be an English folk tune ROSPER, which appears in the English Hymnal of 1909 and to which it bears a resemblance in six of its eight lines. Sheppard was born on August 7, 1852, in Philadelphia and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1872. He took charge of his father’s foundry, which made stoves and heaters in Baltimore, and joined the Presbyterian church in that city. He studied music, was music director in his own church, and for a time was organist at the Zion Protestant Episcopal Church. He served on the committee that produced the Presbyterian Hymnal, 1911. He died at Germantown, Pennsylvania, February 15, 1930.