Just as I am, without one plea

This hymn is crystallized in the 4 words which begin each stz, the 4 which begin all the 4th lines and the 2 which conclude them: ‘Just as I am … O Lamb of God, I come.’ When John the Baptist said, ‘Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’ (John 1:29, cf v36) he was taking up a theme at least as old as the Passover, and preparing us for the language of Revelation 5. This is the repeated name in every stz of Charlotte Elliott’s hymn; most of them are not directly related to this title, but the redeeming, cleansing blood of Jesus, the Lamb of God, is shown distinctly enough in the first two, giving a basis for all that follows; cf 1 Peter 1:19 and 1 John 1:7. The opening words are also paired with ‘I come’ since the author headed her hymn with John 6:37 (AV), ‘Him that cometh unto me, I will in no wise cast out.’ Although arising from frustration at her inability through ill
health to join in strenuous Christian service, and appearing in The Invalid’s Hymn-book which she edited in 1836, the hymn has spoken to and for people of all sorts and conditions. When asked how she (at the age of 32, with all her bitterness) could find Christ, the Swiss evangelist César Malan, a family friend, had first urged her to ‘Come to him just as you are, with your fightings and fears …’ A later letter reminded her of his words, and she wrote the hymn at Brighton c1834, lying at home while the family busied themselves with a fund-raising church bazaar. It was printed on a leaflet the next year; defying her medical condition, she lived into her eighties. Eighty years further on, and the hymn was sung as the conclusion to countless rallies addressed by the evangelist Billy Graham, as thousands were urged to respond to his gospel appeal. Bernard L Manning said in 1924, ‘Much of Charlotte Elliott’s verse [she wrote 150 hymns] has had its day, but some of us owe her eternal gratitude for Just as I am.’ Erik Routley wrote of it in 1955 under the heading ‘Come’, as ‘a simple expansion of that single word’, and in 1979 of its ‘very good shape and a telling climax’. Julian says that ‘it ranks with the finest hymns in the English language.’ These factors among others make revision, even of a line or two, a sensitive issue. Some books cut the knot by omitting one or more stzs. The first stz read ‘… but that thy blood was shed for me,/ and that thou bid’st me come to thee …’ Praise! adopts the Jubilate version here but not in verse 2. 3.3 uses the EH text as being closer to 2 Corinthians 7:5 than ‘fightings and fears, within, without’. The final stz, added in one edn of her own collection Hours of Sorrow Cheered and Comforted, had ‘here for a season.’ Several other writers, not content with revision, have rewritten imitations of the whole text but not succeeded in displacing it; among them the American Russell Cook (as early as 1850), Marianne Hearn (‘Farningham’, 1887) and Genevieve Irons (c1900). ‘O Lamb of God, I come’ is inscribed on the Grasmere tombstone of Wordsworth’s daughter Dora Quillinan who was much moved by the hymn.

Strong views are also held about the tune; HTC 2nd edn (1987) plays safe by providing 3 including Arthur H Brown’s SAFFRON WALDEN as here. Composed for another hymn by the same author (O Holy Saviour, Friend unseen) and appearing with it in The Hymnal Companion to the Book of Common Prayer (3rd edn 1890), it was first set to this text in EH. Saffron Walden is on the edge of Essex, due N of the composer’s native Brentwood. P M Verrall’s tune (in Youth Praise 2 but unnamed) has been available since 1969, G Beaumont’s VENGO since 1958, G Thalben-Ball’s WALFORD since 1926, J Barnby’s JUST AS I AM since 1892, and Henry Smart’s MISERICORDIA since 1875. William Bradbury’s WOODWORTH, composed in N America in 1849, was also set to the hymn and became its favourite music there from 1860. This too has been called JUST AS I AM (as in GH); it crucially repeats the ‘I come’. Not all these are of equal merit or durability, but together help show the lasting attraction of the words.

b Clapham, Surrey (SW London) 1789, d Brighton, Sussex, 1871. The granddaughter of Henry Venn of Huddersfield, in her youth she enjoyed composing light and comic verses; after her conversion her energies were devoted to more specifically sacred themes. Living at Clapham among many evangelical Anglican friends and family, she suffered from poor health from at least her early 30s, particularly after a crippling illness in 1821 which severely affected her faith. But she lived long enough to achieve much and reach many through her writing, surviving for twelve and a half years longer than the 70 her doctor had predicted. 1822 saw the start of a 40-year correspondence with the Swiss evangelical César Malan of Geneva (the century’s leading hymn-writer in French, and to CE ‘the most beautiful Christian character I have ever known’), beginning with an informal private meeting where he directly challenged her with the question, ‘Are you a Christian?’ This encounter led to her best-known and highly-acclaimed hymn (see notes to 704). On family travels in the Alps in her late 40s, partly to escape from English winter fog, she acknowledged ‘the magical effect of the mountain air on my whole frame’. In 1834 she revised and rearranged Miss Kiernan’s The Invalid’s Hymn Book; often reprinted, this included 112 of her own texts. Many of her hymns also featured in a book compiled by her clergyman brother Henry V Elliott, Psalms and Hymns for Public, Private and Social Worship (1838–48). Other collections of her verse appeared in 1836 (Hours of Sorrow cheered and comforted), or Thoughts in Verse chiefly adapted to seasons of sickness, depression or bereavement, 79 items) 1839 and 1869. In her later years she moved to Torquay, and finally to Brighton, by which time she was sometimes too weak even to sit up, with hands crippled with arthritis yet struggling to write letters (particularly for family birthdays) when she could. She was often part of a busy household with many visitors. Her correspondence reveals a humility and sweetness of spirit, not without humour, imbued with touches of the Bible (which she loved and studied with commentaries), the Prayer Book, and the hymns of Watts, Newton and Cowper. She was saddened by the inroads of tractarianism and popery, the desecration of the Christian ‘Sabbath’ (notably by the railways), ‘the dangerous doctrines of the half-Christian teachers who abound in the present day’, the worldliness of many believers and the Free Ch secession or disruption in Scotland, where she had a great friend in Dalkeith. Her love of natural beauty is also evident, but shadows of illness and death are everpresent: ‘This world is the land of the dying, my beloved Jane’.

Her verse too, sometimes approaching Christina Rossetti’s in the next generation, is often sad: ‘Weakness, languor, pain, depression,/ all these ills will pass away’; ‘The thought of death inspires no fear’—the two halves of both these respective fragments typically give weight to both hope and sorrow. Another poem says ‘The plant of Religion best thrives/ in the night of misfortune and grief’; and she could also be firmly resolute (no.880) and cheerfully positive (prefiguring Stuart Townend’s In Christ alone?): ‘Christ is my hope, Christ is my life,/ Christ is my strength, my victory’. After her death her sister Mrs Babington printed Selections from her poems with a memoir (1873), followed by request by a further volume of Leaves from previously unpublished journals, letters and verses. Not all hymnologists are sympathetic to her situation or even very perceptive of it; among those who are, John Ellerton placed her in the ‘front rank’, James Davidson writes warmly in Julian as does Peter Newman Brooks in Hymns as Homilies (1997). 7 of her hymns are found in GH, and 5 in CH (one less in 2004). Charlotte was the aunt (father’s sister) of Emily; see next entry. Nos.704, 880.