These words were written by Priscilla Jane Owens, born July 21, 1829. She was a public school teacher, and also a Sunday school teacher for 50 years in the Methodist church in Baltimore, Maryland. The stanza omitted is: 

                        4.  Give me the Bible, lamp of life immortal,

                             Hold up that splendor by the open grave;

                            Show me the light from heaven’s shining port,

                            Show me the glory gilding Jordan’s wave.

     Owens wrote poetry and prose for the Methodist Recorder and the Christian Standard. Her other hymns in SDAH are No. 340, “Jesus Saves,” and No. 534, “Will Your Anchor Hold?” She was born and spent all her life in Baltimore, Maryland, dying there on December 5, 1907.                                                                   

      The music was composed by Edmund Simon Lorenz, of Dayton, Ohio, a minister of the United Brethren Church. It was printed in his Holy Voices. Born near Canal Fulton, Ohio, July 13, 1854, Lorenz graduated from Yale with a B.D. degree, then pursued further study in music at the University of Leipzig, Germany. At the age of 20 he served as a music editor for the first United Brethren hymnal with music, Hymns of the Sanctuary, 1874. For two years he was president of Lebanon Valley College, Annville, Pennsylvania, but his health broke, and during a period of recuperation he concentrated on music. He began what became the very successful Lorenz and Company, music publisher, putting out two periodicals, The Choir Leader and The Choir Herald, and other church music and organ magazines. Besides composing hymn tunes and gospel songs, he published several books: Practical Church Music, 1909; Church Music, 1923; Music in Work and Worship, 1925; and The Singing Church, 1937. He kept us his activity in this thriving music business right up until his death July 11, 1942, at age 88, in Dayton, Ohio.