Stand up, stand up for Jesus

More than a century later than the previous hymn, we remain in battle mode. Though the details vary with the passage of time and the oftenrepeated narrative, the story of the writing of this text remains one of the most dramatic, authenticated and apparently tragic of those associated with hymns. The essentials are these: on Tues Mar 30 1858, the anti-slavery gospel preacher Dudley Ting had conducted an extraordinarily effective mission meeting in Philadelphia, USA. He touched the 5000 or so gathered in the local YMCA ‘Jayne’s Hall’ with his preaching on Exodus 10:11 (AV): ‘Go now, ye that are men, and serve the Lord’. A few days later he took time off on the family farm, and strayed too close to a mule-driven cornthreshing machine. His sleeve was caught in a cog-wheel which dragged him into the mechanism, and though he was rushed to hospital, his arm was so badly injured that it had to be amputated. Within a week he had died from the combined wounds, but not before he had urged his father (also a clergyman) to urge his fellow-ministers to ‘stand up for Jesus’. His neighbour and friend George Duffield (jnr) preached, either the next Sunday or at the funeral, on Ephesians 6:14 (‘Stand therefore …’), and read out the verses he had written that week to honour Dudley Ting. That was the basis of what became the hymn, thanks to a Sunday School superintendent who had it printed, and the Supplement to The Church Psalmist where it was very soon published.

Some editing of the text has proved inevitable; 2.3 was ‘forth to …’ and 25, ‘Ye that are men …’; 3.3, ‘the arm of flesh’, (almost too?) vividly evocative at the time but clearer as emended, and 3.8, ‘be never wanting’; 4.5,7, ‘To him that overcometh/ … he with …’ One omitted stz ‘Stand up … / the solemn watchword hear’ had the lines ‘charge for the God of battles/ and put the foe to rout.’ PHRW includes 2 versions; the second has a stz, taken from Duffield’s original, for burial and memorial services: ‘Stand up … / each soldier to his post;/ close up the broken column,/ encourage all the host./ Make good the loss so heavy/ in those who still remain;/ and prove to all around you/ that death itself is gain’. In any telling of the story, this note is vital, as is the battle against slavery in all its forms.

George J Webb’s tune MORNING LIGHT was adapted to these words in W B Bradbury’s The Golden Chain (1861; and see 45). Cyril Taylor composed TANWORTH for the irregular metre and longer lines of C S Horne’s hymn For the might of thine arm we bless thee, which he set to it in The BBC Hymn Book of 1951. It is adapted for this text in the present book. Tanworth-in-Arden is a Warwicks village between Redditch and Solihull. Older congregations may recall tunes such as Barnby’s STAND UP, or the distinctively rousing STAND UP FOR JESUS, also known as GEIBEL and composed in 1901 by the blind German/American Adam Geibel, included in Golden Bells and a few current books. Since Webb’s tune has also been called STAND UP, care must be taken with the names.

b Carlisle, Pennsylvania, USA 1818, d Bloomfield, New Jersey, USA 1888. Born into a Presbyterian family, he graduated from Yale Univ and Union Theological Seminary prior to ordination in 1840. His gift for building up small congregations emerged in his diverse pastorates in a 44-year ministry successively in Brooklyn, NY; Bloomfield, NJ; Philadelphia, Penns; Adrian, Michigan; Galesburg, Illinois; and Saginaw, Ann Arbor, and Lansing, Mich. He was a regent of the Univ of Michigan for 7 years, and edited the Presbyterian family paper the Christian Observer. In 1871 Knox Coll awarded him an Hon DD. He retired to Bloomfield with his son Samuel W Duffield, who in 1886 wrote English Hymns, Their Authors and History. Probably the most dramatic moments of his ministry were linked with the events leading to the writing of his best known hymn; to him, the dying words of his friend Dudley Ting (see notes) were ‘as if he had said, “Stand up for Jesus in the person of the downtrodden slave