Jesus, I will trust you

The structure of Mary J Walker’s hymn of faith is clear: ‘I will, may, must, can, do trust you’; what John Newton’s 600 compresses into 2 climactic lines (except the ‘may’), she expounds over her 5 stzs of increasing confidence. Written at Cheltenham where her husband was rector, the text was published in the 1864 Appendix to Psalms and Hymns for Public and Social Worship which he first edited in 1855. Like 698 and 704, it helps to express a personal response within the congregation. Stz 1 draws on Psalm 73:25 and applies a Reformed logic, ‘for sinners, therefore for me’ rather than the Wesleyan/Arminian thinking of ‘for all, therefore for me.’ (Cf H Wreford’s ‘gospel hymn’, ‘Christ is the Saviour of sinners,/ Christ is the Saviour for me …’) CH and GH surprisingly omit the 2nd stz; PHRW the 2nd and 4th. Stz 2 originally read ‘matchless worth … wondrous birth’; 3 had ‘pondering thy ways … lepers sought thy face’; 4.7 was ‘hearken’ (cf the other Mary in Luke 10:39); and 5.3–4 ‘Whosoever cometh, thou wilt not …’

Henry Allen Prothero’s tune VESPERS (as in GH, distinct from that so named in Hymns of Faith and 2 more called VESPER) also has a Cheltenham connection, since the composer (b1848) died there in 1906. Other hymnals have chosen HAYDN (=FOUNDATION, not that at 711), Davis’s GOSHEN, or Smith’s RUTH. Some tunes are arranged and listed as 11 11 11 11, and the text is displayed accordingly.

b Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk 1816, d Cheltenham, Glos 1878. She grew up in Bury St Edmunds, and has been known mainly for the men in her life, as the younger sister (by some 14 years) of fellow-hymn writer James Deck (qv), and later as the wife of Dr Walker, the evangelical Rector of Cheltenham whom she married in 1848. Their two sons were also ordained. It was her husband who in 1855 compiled Psalms and Hymns for Public and Social Worship which featured 9 of hers, signed M.J.W. and including 3 for Passiontide; no other has enjoyed the success of the one included here, which is found in several current evangelical books, although Julian names two different ones as being ‘the most popular’. Her hymns seem to have been written after her marriage, and therefore probably in Cheltenham; one recurring theme is that of the journey of faith. No.703.