Speak, Lord, in the stillness

‘Speak, Lord, for your servant hears’; this response was taught by the aged Eli to the boy Samuel (1 Samuel 3.9) and forms the basis for Emily May Crawford’s hymn. Written in Pondoland on the E coast of S Africa, it was first published in Unseen Realities, 1920. It appeared there over her maiden name E M Grimes, as it did in Golden Bells, The Keswick Hymn Book, The Christian Hymnary (1938 edn) and other books. This is the one hymn of the author’s to make a significant impression; it became a 20th-c pre-sermon favourite, though mainly confined to evangelical collections. Even among these some have omitted it, possibly for the ‘Keswick’ feel of its spirituality. Some hymnals print 6 or 7 stzs, but 5 may be thought sufficient without making the hymn somewhat self-defeating; similar constraints apply to Frances Havergal’s Master, speak, thy servant heareth, based on the same Scripture. Omitted stzs are 4, ‘All to thee is yielded …’ and 7, ‘Like a watered garden/ full of fragrance rare,/ lingering in thy presence/ let my life appear’. 1.2 was originally ‘while I wait on thee’; 2.1 had ‘blessèd Master’; 4, ‘waits my soul upon thee/ for the quickening word’; and 5.4 was ‘in thy child …’.

The tune QUIETUDE was composed for these words by Harold Green in Pondoland when he was a fellow-missionary there with the author, and has been set to them almost from their first appearance. The tune name clearly matches the mood of the hymn. The 1965 Anglican Hymn Book was alone in adding James Ayres’ ST AIDAN as an alternative.

(née Grimes), b Lambeth, Surrey (S London) 1864, d Folkestone, Kent 1927. From 1893 until her marriage in 1904 she was a missionary in Pondoland with the S Africa General Mission. She was a writer in the Keswick tradition; her best-known hymn features, with some variation in the number of stzs, in several evangelical collections including Golden Bells (1925 edn), The Christian Hymnary (from the Churches of Christ, 1938) and Christian Praise (1957)—credited to E May Grimes in all three but with her married surname used in the list of copyright permissions. Another hymn, The Master comes! He calls for thee, is her sole entry in the 1899 Church Missionary Hymn Book, but was in great demand at missionary gatherings of that time and appears in 3 major mid-20th-c books. Her husband Dr TWW Crawford had served with CMS in Kenya, then British East Africa. She was one of those contributing briefly to the 1905 biography of Albert Head; see also under E A P Head. No.563.