O breath of life, come sweeping through us

Authors:
Themes:
Scriptures:
  • Genesis 2:7
  • Ezra 9:8-9
  • Job 27:3
  • Psalms 119:139
  • Psalms 43:3
  • Psalms 51:12
  • Psalms 80:3
  • Psalms 85:6-7
  • Ezekiel 37:9-14
  • Habakkuk 3:2
  • Matthew 5:14-16
  • Luke 1:78
  • John 14:17
  • John 16:7-11
  • John 20:22
  • Acts 13:13
  • Acts 15:38
  • Acts 4:31
  • Titus 2:14
  • 1 Peter 2:9
  • Revelation 3:2
Book Number:
  • 541

O breath of life, come sweeping through us,
revive your church with life and power;
O Breath of life, come, cleanse, renew us
and fit your church to meet this hour.

2. O Wind of God, come bend us, break us
till humbly we confess our need;
then, in your tenderness remake us,
revive, restore-for this we plead.

3. O Breath of love, come breathe within us,
renewing thought and will and heart;
come, love of Christ, afresh to win us,
revive your church in every part!

4. Revive us, Lord! Is zeal abating
while millions stumble into night?
Revive us, Lord! The world is waiting;
equip your church to spread the light.

Elizabeth A P Head 1850-1936

The Holy Spirit - His Work in Revival

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Tune

The story behind the hymn

‘Give life … by your almighty breath’; these words from the previous hymn could almost be the text for this one, had not Scriptures such as Ezekiel 37:1–14 and Acts 2:1–4 already provided sufficient material. Revival is again on the agenda, this time in the prayer of Elizabeth Ann Porter Head— sometimes ‘Bessie’ but rarely omitting her maiden name of Porter. This is the best-known of her hymns, being written in 1914 and published in her Heavenly Places, and other Messages in 1920, when she was seventy. Cliff Knight points out the value of the initial imploring ‘O’, further accentuated by the music. The Keswick Hymn Book published in 1938, soon after her death, and its 1975 successor Keswick Praise, helped to confirm this as a longterm favourite at the Keswick Convention, and it has spread far beyond that early setting. The original 4th stz, ‘O heart of Christ, once broken for us …’, is perhaps surprisingly omitted from most current books, some of which also delete the final stz. The present 4.2 replaces ‘… harvest fields are vast and white’; the HTC rearrangement has not been used.

It was KHB which also introduced Mary Jane Hammond’s tune SPIRITUS VITAE (‘Spirit/Breath of life’) to which it has been sung ever since; in 1983 Hymns and Psalms set it instead to a Wesleyan tune, Andrew Roner’s ISLINGTON.

A look at the author

Head, Elizabeth (Bessie) Ann Porter

b Norfolk 1850, d Wimbledon, Surrey 1936. Also known by her maiden name as Bessie Porter, her various forms of Christian service included the YMCA, as secretary of the Swansea branch. From 1897 to 1901 she worked with the South Africa General Mission in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, maintaining her work for the society, including magazine articles, on her return. In 1907 she married an old family friend, the widower Albert A Head, an early chairman of the Keswick Convention, thus becoming stepmother to the remarkable disabled engineer Alfred Head. A little earlier Bessie was one of a distinguished group of Christian leaders who paid a warm tribute to Albert’s first wife Caroline, née Hanbury, in a biography written by Caroline’s sister Charlotte in 1905. Caroline came from Quaker stock who became evangelical Anglicans; Elizabeth Porter wrote: ‘May the Holy Spirit teach us how to live “Praise