William Walford, in or about the year 1842, when his sight was failing, recited this poem to his acquaintance Thomas Salmon, who was a Congregational minister at Coleshill, Warwickshire, from 1838 to 1842. The latter wrote it down and took it across the Atlantic, where it was published in the New York Observer on September 13, 1845.

Walford was born on January 9, 1772, at Bath, Somerset. He moved to London with his parents when he was 5 years old. After three or four years his father died, and the family moved to Nantwich in Cheshire. While still a child, he wanted to be a clergyman, but when he was 12 he moved to Birmingham and was apprenticed for seven years to an engraver. He was confirmed in the Anglican Church but occasionally attended a Baptist church, where the minister fanned his early desire to become a minister. An Anglican minister offered Walford the finances to train at a university to be an Anglican minister, but he had scruples about the Book of Common Prayer that was obligatory for Church of England ministers to follow. He joined the Congregational church in Carr’s Lane, Birmingham, and in 1793 embarked on a six-year ministerial course at the Congregational College in Homerton, London, which enrolled about 20 students. He was appointed to the parish at Stowmarket in Suffolk when he was 24, even though he had not completed the full six years of the course. He moved to Yarmouth in Norfolk, where the congregation was more numerous and more affluent and were therefore able to pay a higher stipend, which enabled him to marry. He was ordained in 1800, although he objected to the use of this word for his church, and indeed for other Christian communions too. His health was not good, so after almost

14 years at Yarmouth he was appointed as tutor of classics, i.e., Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, at Homerton College. The change of occupation helped somewhat in his continual headaches, but the loss of his daughter at the 17 in an accident caused him to request a transfer to pastoral work once more. After a break of a few years at Hackney, he moved to Uxbridge in Middlesex in 1838, but in 1847 he finally retired. He gave considerable help in the establishment of the New College, which replaced Homerton. He died on June 22, 1850, at Uxbridge.

SWEET HOUR was composed especially for these words by William Batchelder Bradbury (1816-1868; see Biographies), and obviously takes its name from the words that open and close every stanza. It was composed in 1859 and appears in The Golden Chain, 1861, which was compiled by Bradbury.

📖 Reference: Companion to the Seventh-day Adventist Hymnal by Wayne Hooper and Edward E. White. Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1988.