Titled “The Love of Jesus,” this poem was included in a novel, Say and Seal, 1859, written by Anna Warner and her sister Susan (who wrote another children’s song, “Jesus Bids Us Shine”). One of the characters in the book was a motherless boy named Johnny Fax. After the book attained fame, Warner wrote: “For the time being, Johnny Fax was so intensely real, so vividly in my heart, that the hymn was written for him, as if he had been a living child.” There have been a number of alterations and rewrites published in different hymnbooks.

Anna Bartlett Warner was born in 1820 on Long Island, New York, the daughter of a New York lawyer. When she was 17, she and her family moved to Constitution Island, near West Point. She wrote several novels under the name “Amy Lothrop,” and two books of verse, Hymns of the Church Militant, 1858, and Wayfaring Hymns, Original and Translated, 1869. For many years Anna and her older sister Susan held Sunday school classes for the cadets at West Point Military Academy. Their home, named Good Crag, was willed to the academy and is now a national shrine. Anna died in 1915 at age 95; the army gave her a funeral as though she had been one of the soldiers.

She also wrote SDAH 494, “We Would See Jesus.”

BRADBURY, also known as CHINA and JESUS LOVES ME, was first put with these words in The Golden Shower, 1862, published by William Bradbury (1816–1868; see Biographies); it sold an astonishing 2 million copies! The text and tune have been inseparable ever since. The harmonization in SDAH is by the committee that prepared the Australian Hymn Book, 1977. Carried to nearly all the countries of the world by missionaries, this song has become the most loved and sung of any children’s hymn. W. Hines Sims, editor of the Baptist Hymnal, 1956, says that while visiting a Buddhist temple in Hawaii in 1954, he heard the children singing, “Yes, Buddha loves me, Yes, Buddha loves me”!