When peace, like a river, attends all my way

For a century and a half this hymn has been a distinctive blend of words and music, with a remarkable and authentic story of its origins. While the opening recalls the imagery of Isaiah as found in 799 and the chorus is based on the words of Elisha in 2 Kings 4:26 (see also 3 John 2), the sea-billows in its second line are for once more than a ready metaphor. It qualifies twice over for any anthology or festival of sea-related hymns, since it is inextricably linked with the life of its author Horatio Gates Spafford. This lawyer and businessman had recently lost his son when Chicago’s great fire of 1871 claimed most of his invested wealth. By 1873, with the family some way along on the road to recovery, he planned to visit Europe and take part in the current Moody and Sankey mission in Britain. Further business delayed him in Chicago, so his wife and four daughters sailed without him, on the SS ‘Ville de Havre’ as planned. At 2.0 am on 22 Nov the ship collided in mid-Atlantic with the English iron-built sailing ship ‘Lochearn’, and sank with the loss of over 200 lives. The four girls, Maggie, Tanetta, Ann and Bessie, were all drowned; each of them a committed Christian who had been particularly moved by D L Moody’s preaching in America. Mrs Spafford survived, rescued from the sea by a crew member Mr Lockurn (a name given by Ira Sankey but suspiciously similar to that of the vessel), and cabled her husband from Cardiff with the words ‘Saved alone’.

Horatio immediately sailed to join her, and (according to their surviving daughter Bertha) on his outward voyage wrote the words of this hymn. Sankey, however, remembers the words being written in 1876 while he was staying with the Spaffords in Chicago. Whichever is the more accurate account, the hymn was published in Gospel Songs No.2 in 1876, edited by Sankey and Bliss, and slightly emended a year later for Sankey’s Sacred Songs and Solos where it was headed with Psalm 55:18. The lines are structured around the word ‘soul’ and its rhyme in every stz; changes made for the present book come at 1.3 (from ‘my lot’) and stz 2 (from ‘should … should … blest … hath regarded my helpless estate’). Stz 3 has sometimes been quoted for the unintended humour of ‘My sin—O the bliss of this glorious thought’; hence the change here. Stz 4 read ‘For me be it Christ … / if Jordan above me shall roll,/ no pang …’; and 5, ‘But Lord, ’tis for thee … / Oh trump of the Angel! oh, voice of the Lord!/ Blessed hope, blessed rest of my soul.’ GH omits stz 4 and prints a different (but equivalent) version of 5.

The tune IT IS WELL was composed for the words by Philip Bliss immediately he had seen them and heard their story, and published with them only months before his own tragic death, also in 1876. MP uses an arrangement by Phil Burt; Linda Mawson has newly arranged the music for Praise!

b North Troy, NY, USA 1828, d Jerusalem 1888. After growing up in New York he moved to Chicago where he established a successful law practice. He belonged to the Presbyterian Ch, supported the early missions of Moody and Sankey, and was director and trustee for the Presbyterian Theological Seminary of the Northwest (later renamed the McCormick Theol Seminary). He and his wife had already lost a son when ‘the Great Chicago Fire’ of 1871 which killed 300 people also destroyed most of his property; ironically, the almost-forgotten fire at Peshtigo, Washington, killed five times as many that same day. The tragic personal losses at sea which led to the writing of his most notable hymn have been described in many books, as they are in the notes to vol 1. His interest in Palestine, and expectation of Christ’s imminent return, led the Spaffords to settle there in 1881, and he spent his remaining 7 years or so in and around Jerusalem. There he also founded an American community; its story was told by the surviving daughter Bertha Spafford Vesta in her book Our Jerusalem. Like several other worthies he was buried in the Protestant cemetery near Mount Zion. No.804.