Take time to be holy, speak much with your Lord

The didactic hymn, focused on duty more than doctrine, is from a genre we may be losing and which seemed easier 100 or more years ago. If this one is now sung less, it would be rash to claim that we had outgrown its message. William Longstaff wrote it c1882 after a sermon on 1 Peter 1:16: his friend Ira Sankey, who first published it in New Hymns and Solos in 1888, says the preacher was at New Brighton on Merseyside, while others give the place as Keswick and his name as the China missionary Griffith John. It is certainly his one enduring hymn. Words which have been altered here are ‘oft … abide’ (1.1–2); ‘whatever betide’ (3.2); ‘each temper … thus’ (4.2–3).

For most of its life, it has been set to the tune which George Stebbins composed for it, known simply as STEBBINS or TAKE TIME TO BE HOLY. There is no doubt, however, that setting them to ST DENIO, as arranged here (also 248) by Linda Mawson, establishes them in a less sentimental and more vigorous mood.

b Sunderland, Tyne and Wear (Co Durham) 1822, d Sunderland 1894. A businessman and ship-owner, he was a former member of the CofE who helped to establish the Bethesda Free Chapel founded in Sunderland by Arthur A Rees. For a time he was the chapel’s treasurer. He took what was then a bold lead in welcoming the evangelistic duo of D L Moody and Ira D Sankey to England in 1873. He formed a close friendship with them and with Wm Booth, founder and ‘General’ of the Salvation Army to which he may have briefly belonged; several songs by W D Longstaff were published in the Salvationist paper The War Cry between 1883 and 1889. Gordon Taylor, SA, says these were ‘probably written by the same author’. The one undoubted text for which he became known, a didactic/devotional favourite of its kind, is found in many traditional evangelical hymn-books. No.815.