My Jesus, I love you, I know you are mine;

If William R Featherston(e) is the author of this hymn, he is yet another writer who is known by a single text (cf 727 and 733, among many others), and one of the few Canadians of his time to have a hymn in much wider use. He is said to have sent it to his aunt Mrs E Featherstone Wilson of Los Angeles, on whose suggestion it was published in the 1862 Primitive Methodist Magazine. Although Julian notes that it appeared anonymously, in The London Hymn Book of 1864, American sources (relying on Sankey?) supply the author’s name, adding that he was only 16 at the time and died at the age of 28, though the precise dates are uncertain and are given differently in different hymn-books. If the N Americans are correct, this gives an added poignancy to stzs 3 and 4. Reading or singing the words in this light, some have been struck by his mature use of language and metre, others equally by a kind of unselfconscious innocence in the expression of his love for Jesus. There is precedent for this latter in Psalm 18; his 2nd stz shows that he knows the source of that love, as in 1 John 4:19.

When it first appeared, the text was headed ‘Jesus, All in All’; the opening has sometimes been changed to ‘My Saviour …’ or ‘Lord Jesus …’ The consistent structure leads up to each repeated 4th line, requiring the same rhyme in line 3; unlike 281, this is not varied but in the original uses thou/brow/brow/brow. As adapted for Praise!, 1.3 is changed from ‘my gracious Redeemer, my Saviour art thou’; 2.1 from ‘I love thee because thou hast first lovèd me’; 3.3 from ‘… the death-dew lies cold …’; and 4.1–2 ‘In mansions … / in heaven adoring I’ll live in your light.’ Books such as the 2001 Worship and Rejoice find stz 3 a little too much, and accordingly omit it. A more complex account of the history of the text is given by Gordon Taylor in The Companion to the Song Book of the Salvation Army (1989), where the claim to authorship by the Methodist James Duffil (or Duffell, of W Bromwich, also in the 1860s) is outlined. See also the 1992 Handbook to the Baptist Hymnal, Nashville.

Though Emily F Miller’s tune (and its names), requiring the repeats as indicated, seems perfectly to match the words and was probably composed for them, it has been widely used with Wm Booth’s O boundless salvation, deep ocean of love, from 1893. It is variously known as AFFECTION or MY JESUS, I LOVE THEE. In style it resembles the decorated style of earlier Methodist music. The baptist Adoniram J Gordon’s CLARENDON STREET (=GORDON, sometimes dated 1876), was also composed for the hymn, published in the 1864 London Hymn Book and appears in Sankey, Fresh Sounds, GH, MP and elsewhere. (That composer, who ministered in New England where he founded a college and a seminary, said that ‘in a moment of inspiration a beautiful new air sang itself to me’.)

b Montreal, Quebec, Canada 1846, d Montreal 1873. He grew up as a Wesleyan Methodist in Montreal. His family’s church later became St James’s Methodist Ch, then St James’s United Ch; WRF lived in that city all his life. He was converted at the age of 16, and appears to have written his best-known hymn, including its most solemn adult lines, around that time. He sent it to his aunt in Los Angeles; she sent it to the Primitive Methodist Magazine that same year (1862) and two years later it featured anonymously in a British book for the first time (it was still ‘anon’ to Julian). At a period when few Canadian hymns were sung outside Canada, it entered Sankey’s Sacred Songs and Solos and it is still used in the UK in CH, MP and other books. No.735.