Hymn Of The Week: October 26, 2020
Hymn of the Week:
Shall We Gather at the River
Glory to God #375
Text and Music by Robert Lowry
Shall We Gather at the River
Shall we gather at the river?
Where bright angel feet have trod
With its crystal tide forever
Flowing by the throne of God
Yes, we'll gather at the river
The beautiful, the beautiful river
Gather with the saints at the river
That flows by the throne of God
On the margin of the river,
Washing up it’s silver spray,
We will walk and worship ever,
All the happy golden day.
Yes, we'll gather at the river
The beautiful, the beautiful river
Gather with the saints at the river
That flows by the throne of God
E’re we reach the shining river,
Lay we ev’ry burden down,
Grace our spirits will deliver
And provide a robe and a crown.
Yes, we'll gather at the river
The beautiful, the beautiful river
Gather with the saints at the river
That flows by the throne of God
Soon we'll reach the shining river
Soon our pilgrimage will cease
Soon our happy hearts will quiver
With the melody of peace
Yes, we'll gather at the river
The beautiful, the beautiful river
Gather with the saints at the river
That flows by the throne of God
With All Saints coming up this weekend, a time when we remember and appreciate all the saints that have come before us and are with us today, I thought the beautiful and timeless hymn, Shall We Gather at the River by Robert Lowry would be a fitting tribute. Here is a description of the hymn from the author’s own words. The description comes from the website: www.hymnologyarchive.com
Dr. Robert Lowry (1826–1899) provided this story behind “Shall We Gather at the River,” which appeared posthumously in Ira Sankey’s My Life and the Story of the Gospel Hymns (Philadelphia: Sunday School Times, 1906):
On a sultry afternoon in July 1864, Dr. Lowry was sitting at his study table in Elliott Place, Brooklyn, when the words of the hymn, “Shall We Gather at the River?” came to him. He recorded them hastily, and then sat down before his parlor organ and composed the tune which is now sung in all the Sunday-schools of the world. In speaking of the song, Dr. Lowry said:
“It is brass-band music, has a march movement, and for that reason has become popular, though, for myself, I do not think much of it. Yet on several occasions, I have been deeply moved by the singing of this very hymn. Going from Harrisburg to Lewisburg once, I got into a car filled with half-drunken lumbermen. Suddenly one of them struck up, ‘Shall We Gather at the River?’ and they sang it over and over again, repeating the chorus in a wild, boisterous way. I did not think so much of the music then, as I listened to those singers; but I did think that perhaps the spirit of the hymn, the words so flippantly uttered, might somehow survive and be carried forward into the lives of those careless men, and ultimately lift them upward to the realization of the hope expressed in the hymn.
A different appreciation of it was evinced during the Robert Raikes centennial [1880]. I was in London and had gone to a meeting in the Old Bailey to see some of the most famous Sunday-school workers of the world. They were present from Europe, Asia, and America. I sat in a rear seat alone. After there had been a number of addresses delivered in various languages I was preparing to leave when the chairman of the meeting announced that the author of ‘Shall We Gather at the River?’ was present, and I was requested by name to come forward. Men applauded and women waved their handkerchiefs as I went to the platform. It was a tribute to the hymn; but I felt, after it was over, that I had perhaps done some little good in the world” (pp. 132–133).
Henry Burrage, in his Baptist Hymn Writers and Their Hymns (Portland, Maine: Brown Thurston & Co., 1888), provided this more detailed account of how the hymn was written:
The hymn “Shall We Gather at the River” was written one afternoon in July 1864, when Dr. Lowry was pastor of the Hanson Place Baptist Church, Brooklyn, N.Y. The weather was oppressively hot, and the author was lying on a lounge in a state of physical exhaustion. He was almost incapable of bodily exertion, and his imagination began to take itself wings. Visions of the future passed before him with startling vividness. The imagery of the Apocalypse took the form of tableaux. Brightest of all were the throne,
the heavenly river, and the gathering of the saints. While he was thus breathing heavily in the sultry atmosphere of that July day, his soul seemed to take new life from that celestial outlook. He began to wonder why the hymn-writers had said so much about “the river of death,” and so little about “the pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.”
As he mused, the words began to construct themselves. They came first as a question, of Christian inquiry, “Shall we gather?” Then they broke out in chorus, as an answer of Christian faith, “Yes, we’ll gather.” On this question and answer, the hymn developed itself. The music came with the hymn. The author never has been able to tell which had priority of birth. They are twins. When the song had formulated itself, the author sprang up, sat down at his organ, played the tune through, and sang the first stanza and the chorus. Then he wrote it out (pp. 430–431).
Burrage’s account seems to be paraphrased from an older, first-person account, repeated in many other sources without citation.
The hymn text draws largely from the quoted passage of Revelation 22:1, and it uses a question-and-answer format between the stanzas and the chorus. Lowry might have been inspired by another gospel hymn on a similar theme, “Shall We Meet Beyond the River” by Horace Hastings (1831–1899), penned in 1858.
Shortly after writing the hymn, Lowry included it in a set of hymns requested by the American Tract Society, for their publication Happy Voices (1865 | Fig. 1). This first printing contained five stanzas.
