In the year 1848 Abraham Lincoln spoke in Congress against war in Mexico, for it appeared to him to be merely an excuse for the slave-holding states of the South to gain more territory and thus extend slavery. James Russell Lowell supported this protest by writing a long poem of 18 stanzas of five lines each, entitled “The Present Crisis.” The poem was reduced to four stanzas of eight lines each by W. Garrett Horder (1841- 1922). Horder was a Congregational minister in England who was specially interested in hymnology and compiled several hymnals. He took Lowell’s poem, which appeared in his Poems of 1849, selected sentences from the poem as he pleased, and produced the present hymn. It was printed in Horder’s Hymns, Supplemental to Existing Collections, 1894. Notice that the word truth occurs in each stanza; the emphasis throughout son standing for truth, even if in a minority.

James Russell Lowell was born on February 22, 1819, at Cambridge, Massachusetts. He studied at Harvard, graduating in 1838. He took up law 1840; from 1855 to 1871 he was professor of language and literature at from 1857 to 1861, and the North American Review from 1863 to 1872. In Harvard, succeeding the poet Longfellow. He edited the Atlantic Monthly 1877 he was appointed as United States minister to Spain and in 1880 as ambassador to England, serving until 1885. He was poet, essayist, and diplomat; he sided strongly with the abolitionists in the slavery issue, particularly while editor of The Pennsylvania Freeman. He died August 12, 1891, at Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The tune TON-Y-BOTEL, also used for “God Has Spoken by His Prophets,” was composed in 1890 by Thomas John Williams (1869-1944; see SDAH 413).

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