This hymn was written by a man who lived in the city and spent his life caring and working for the people of the city.  It is based on Matthew 22:29; “Go ye therefore into the highways, and as many as ye shall find, bid to the marriage,” a text on which Frank North had just preached a sermon.

North was a corresponding secretary for the New York church Extension and Missionary Society.  His office looked out on busy Fifth Avenue, where he was daily made aware of the stressful and sometimes wretched conditions under which city people live and work.  He had been challenged by Caleb T. Winchester, one of the editors working on the American Methodist Hymnal, 1905, to write a new hymn about the work of city missions.  Evidently the six stanzas did not come to him all at once, for his papers at Drew University are nine portions or unfinished stanzas, together with phrases and ideas he had collected from reading and from speeches he had heard on this subject.  Under the title “A prayer for the Multitudes,” the finish poem was first printed in the June 1903 issue of the Christian City, the journal of the Methodist city Missionary Society, of which North was editor.  Here is the author’s own account of the experience behind this missionary hymn “I…was familiar with the tragedy, as it is always seemed to me, of the jostling, moving currents of the life  of the people as revealed upon the streets and at great crossing the avenues. And I have watched them by the hour as they passed, by tens of thousands. . . . That [the hymn] has found its way into so many of the modern hymnals and by translation into so many of the other languages is significant, not as to the quality of the hymn itself but as to the fact that it is in an expression of that tremendous movement of the soul of the gospel in our times which demands that the follower of Christ must make the interest of  the people his own, and must find the heart of the world’s need.”

Born in Manhattan, New York City, on December 3, 1850, Frank Mason North grew up in the teeming city crowds.  After graduating from Wesleyan University, he was ordained a Methodist minister in 1872.  For the next nine years he served churches in Florida; New York City Mission Society and editor of the Christian City.  From 1912 to 1924 he was secretary of the Methodist Board foreign Missions, and for four of these years, president of the Federal council of churches.  Honorary degrees have been conferred upon North by several institutions of learning, and he served on many governing boards.  In 1970, the hymn of the society America published eight of his hymns in a booklet, hymns of Frank Mason North.  He died at Madison, New Jersey, on December 17, 1935.

For comments on the GARDINER, see SDAH 177, “Jesus, Your Blood and Righteousness.” SDAH uses it again at No. 376, “All Things Are Thine.”