Take my life, and let it be

With this hymn, it is generally agreed, Frances Ridley Havergal reaches the peak of her writing. It is also pinpointed by the author to a particular place and time; to Arley (or Areley) House near Stourport, Worcs, during the night of 4 Feb 1874. Her own words have often been reprinted, but they came not in an isolated moment but as one summit in a growing (and always unfinished) process. Towards the end of 1873 she received in a letter ‘a tiny book’ called All for Jesus, which (as she wrote to its author) ‘has touched me very much … I know I love Jesus, and there are times when I feel such intensity of love to Him that I have not words to describe it.’ As she later told her sister Maria, a special blessing was granted her on Advent Sunday, 2 Dec, when ‘I first saw clearly the blessing of true consecration. I saw it as a flash of electric light, and what you see you can never unsee. There must be full surrender before there can be full blessedness.’ Among much further correspondence she quoted the Prayer Book Communion service, where having received the sacrament ‘we say, “And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies …��?’ To another friend she related ‘the origin of the consecration hymn.’ On a 5-day visit to Stourport ‘there were ten persons in the house, some unconverted and long prayed for, some converted but not rejoicing Christians.’ She prayed for them all, and ‘before I left the house every one had got a blessing.’ On the last night she was too happy to sleep; she ‘passed most of the night in praise and renewal of my own consecration, and these little couplets formed themselves and chimed in my heart one after another …’ As she explained a month later, when for a time she felt no further prompting to write, ‘I can never set myself to write verse.’ In her remaining years she would often sing the verses at social gatherings, often distributing ‘response cards’ for those present to sign their names underneath the printed hymn. ‘Our songs’, she wrote, will reach more hearts than those of finer voices and more brilliant execution, unaccompanied by His power.’

The hymn was published in her Loyal Responses, or Daily Melodies for the King’s Minstrels (1878), where the text, still in couplets, is the reading for the first day of 31, headed by the Prayer Book words from Cranmer’s ‘Prayer of Oblation’ quoted above (see also Wesley’s 837, note). But it had already appeared in an 1874 Appendix to Songs of Grace and Glory. In one of several later allusions to the hymn, which soon became well known, she responds in 1877 to literal-minded critics ‘who do not understand the spirit’ of her hymn: ‘Yes, “not a mite would I withhold��?; but that does not mean that, because we have ten shillings in our purse, we are pledged to put it all into the next collecting-plate, else we should have none for the next call!’ On the other hand, she clearly had the ‘widow’s mite’ in mind (Luke 21:1–4); she herself knew what such giving meant, and those who choose the hymn today (as with similar hymns of ‘consecration’) need to be aware of what they are asking others to sing. Not for Frances Havergal the tensions of the item immediately following at 851.

Her hymn became famous worldwide in many translations. Its original text was soon set in 4-line stzs and is usually sung in that way, but it now provides a challenge to editors committed to sensitive revision since 5 of the 12 couplets depend on a rhyme with ‘thee’ or ‘thine’. Here the Jubilate version is substantially adopted, which involves changes at 1.2–3 (from ‘consecrated, Lord, to thee;/ take my moments and my days’; HTC has ‘passing days’); 2.3–4 (‘… be/ swift and beautiful for thee’; the change makes explicit the point from Isaiah 52:7); 3.3–4 (‘… and let them be/ filled with messages from thee’); 4.3 (‘… my intellect, and …’); 5.1–2 (‘… will, and make it thine;/ it shall be no longer mine’; see the note to 517); and 6.4, ‘ever, only, all for thee’). HTC also changes 4.1–2 to the less literal but less allusive ‘Take my wealth—all I possess,/ make me rich in holiness.’ Whichever version is used, eyes and voice need to run on from line to line as the sense does; the old ‘lining out’ will not do here. Among much literature on this text, The Hymn of April 2002 (53.2, Hymn Soc of the US & Canada), has a recent study by Vincent A Lenti in which he regrets the growing habit of revision. But the best commentary on it has to be the author’s own small book of some 120 pages, Kept for the Master’s Use, where she devotes a short chapter to each of the 12 original couplets. This was reprinted in the 20th c by the Moody Press, Chicago.

The words were first set to PATMOS (=CONSECRATION) composed by the author’s father William H Havergal and published in 1871; this remained her first choice. Since then they have been set to several different tunes, each with its strong advocates. Suggested here are ABERAFON and VIENNA (10, 603), while NOTTINGHAM and even ST BEES are also popular. The first choice here is H A César Malan’s 19th-c HENDON, which requires a repeat of each 4th line. The Salvation Army has included this tune in its song books but it is not in wide use elsewhere and its name remains unexplained.

b Astley, Worcs 1836, d Caswell Bay, Oystermouth, nr Swansea, Glam 1879. Named after a distant ancestor, the Protestant martyr Bp Nicholas Ridley, she was a bubbly personality growing up as her father’s favourite in an evangelical and musical family. A gifted linguist from her Worcester childhood onwards, she learned Lat, Gk and Heb as well as French, German and Italian. She was reading and memorising Bible portions from the age of 4 (and later in their original languages), writing verse from 7 onwards, proficient at the piano and in singing, teaching younger Sunday School children at 9, and at 14 made a decisive commitment to Christ—which for her meant service as well as belonging. This was the year when, following her mother’s death, she followed her older sisters to boarding school at Campden House. Caroline Cooke, who led her to the point of clear decision, was soon to marry Frances’s widowed father. From 1859 onwards she worked energetically in support of the (evangelistic) Irish Society. Uncertain health did not prevent her from travelling to the continent including a further (and strictly discipined) educational year in Düsseldorf, Germany, and five journeys to the Swiss Alps where she revelled in some adventurous climbing—not unique among Victorian ladies but far more demanding for them than for their modern counterparts. In her ‘love affair with the Alps’ she was constantly moved by the mountain scenery to adoration of the Creator. By 1860 she was contributing verse to the journal Good Words and her own first collection came in 1869/71 with The Ministry of Song (5th edn 1888). She was also now a solo singer with the Kidderminster Philharmonic Soc. Her father’s death in 1870, and an attack of typhoid, spurred her to further travel and intense literary and mission work including her best-known hymns.

On Advent Sunday 1873 she experienced a deep spiritual renewal; her pursuit of holiness in no way lessened the lighter touch of her wit and humour. She was a keen supporter of the early Mildmay and Keswick Conferences (later the ‘Convention’—while remaining wary of what she saw as some of its extremes), CMS (which featured 12 of her hymns in its centenary collection The Church Missionary Hymn Book of 1899) and other evangelical causes at home and abroad. The Rev Charles Busbridge Snepp enlisted her help in editing his Songs of Grace and Glory; Hymnal Treasures of the Church of Christ from the 6th to the 19th Centuries (1872-74) and became a personal friend. This book went through many editions. FRH corresponded with the American Fanny Crosby (see notes to Frances J Van Alstyne): ‘Dear blind singer over the sea,/ this English heart goes forth to thee./ Sister, what will our meeting be/ when our hearts shall sing, our eyes shall see!’ In 1879, the final year of her relatively short life, she wrote the last of her dozen or so books, Kept for the Master’s Use. She had recently turned down the last of several proposals of marriage; and she died in June before being able to address a Church Congress at Swansea in October. Her place was taken by John Ellerton, qv, who began by saying that ‘the hymns of this lady will live long in the heart of the church’.

Frances’s sister Maria published Memorials of Frances Ridley Havergal in 1880, and her verse was collected posthumously as Poetical Works (2 vols, 1884). Church Hymns (SPCK 1871) was the first hymnal to include her work; by its 5th edn, Hymns of Consecration and Faith featured 5 items of FRH’s words and music combined, with a further 19 hymn texts and 3 tunes. Hymns of Faith (1964) has 18 of her texts; 5 are included in the 2006 Evangelical Lutheran Worship. Most hymns appeared first as leaflets; most are addressed to Christ. Biographies include those by T H Darlow (1927) and Janet Grierson (published by the Havergal Society on the centenary of her death, 1979), and her writings for children have been reprinted as recently as 2005. She also appears as a rare hymnwriter in J G Lawson’s eccentric but useful Deeper Experiences of Famous Christians (1911). John Ellerton says, ‘Christ was her King; she loved to call him so‘; to Spurgeon she was the ‘last and loveliest of our modern poets’ and Pamela Bugden points out that ‘the esteem…was mutual’ (Ever, only, ALL for Thee, 2007). Nancy Cho, who in 2007 completed her work on women hymnwriters, ranks her as the foremost. See also Carol Purves, Travels with Frances Ridley Havergal, Day One ‘Travel Guide’ series, 2010. Nos.515, 658, 698, 728, 799, 850, 854, 859, 860.