The year is 1772, and the place, a small vicarage in the village of Hebden Bridge — that’s in west Yorkshire, right in the heart of what would become England’s smokiest and busiest and grimiest industrial district, led by Manchester and Leeds and the seaport of Liverpool. Wool manufacture is the main occupation, and that meant long hours in the mills, and not much wealth accruing to the people, not yet and not by a long shot. The pastor of the Wainsgate Baptist church there, John Fawcett, was 43 years old, with a big and growing family, and all that the people at Wainsgate could ever afford to give him as a salary was 25 pounds in a year. But suddenly a living opened up for him in the London area at Carter’s Lane Baptist Church, at the death of his friend John Gill, who had been the pastor there for 52 years. So Fawcett traveled to London and spent nine weeks at Carter’s Lane, preaching 58 times in those weeks, getting accustomed to the place, and looking forward to a house that could well fit his family, and the end of continual worries about how to make ends meet. He’d even preached his farewell sermon at Wainsgate. But when he returned to that poor place and loaded up his wagons with whatever of his family’s modest possessions he had not sold to pay for the move — clothes and furniture and books and so on — the people of Wainsgate came out to bid him farewell, but also to plead with him to stay.
Then this happened:
“His affection for his little flock, which he had so long tended ‘in the wilderness,’ would not suffer him to leave them when the trial came. Those disinterested views which first determined him to settle in this secluded spot operated so forcibly, that he could not change his post. Like the country clergyman, ‘He ne’er had changed, nor wished to change, his place.’
When he found his mind to waver, he intimated to the people that 40 pounds a year would be the extent of his wishes; but though they hesitated, and even declined entering into any engagement to raise that sum annually, his attachment to them was so deeply fixed, that he concluded, at once, to cast himself on Providence, and live and die with them.”
And so he did, though he was a well-known preacher and a prolific author and hymn-writer, and though he numbered among his good friends such accomplished and indefatigable men as George Whitefield and John Newton. Fawcett had written many a hymn before, but once he had determined to stay where he was, he was moved to write our current Hymn of the Week at Word and Song, which begins with these words: “Blest be the tie that binds / Our hearts in Christian love.” Those ties bound him to Wainsgate, and he wrote in gratitude for them. And indeed, in the nearby town of Bradford, you may visit a small memorial to John Fawcett, a bronze plaque erected in 1912 by his great-great-granddaughter Lady Horsfall of Glusburn, with those very lines at their base. From all that I can find, the Horsfall family has been full of noble patriots and benefactors to their homelands in Yorkshire and to the British nation at large.
If you had a big family in those days, you were most fortunate indeed if you did not lose a child; Johann Sebastian Bach fathered 20 children (all within wedlock!), but only 10 survived to adulthood. Mr. Fawcett too knew that loss. He and his wife, for the rest of their lives, could not recall the death of their four-year-old boy Stephen without the deepest emotion. These poetic lines, referring to the boy’s death, were found among Fawcett’s papers:
As once of old the proto-martyr cried,
“Jesus, receive me,” so young Stephen died;
“I go to Jesus,” said the lovely boy,
Then took his flight to yonder world of joy.
So our hymn this week is a beautiful meditation on what it means to have, as your family, the whole of the Christian people, but also for your own family to be bound up together in Christ. I’m giving you here all six verses that Fawcett wrote, though the hymn usually appears in hymnals with only three or four. That’s a shame, since the warmth of feeling, the longing to see one’s kindred again, and friends long lost, comes across most powerfully in the entirety.
This week’s hymn features The Fireside Singers with a very sweet arrangement with modest guitar and harp and a lovely harmonization.
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Blest be the tie that binds Our hearts in Christian love; The fellowship of kindred minds Is like to that above. Before our Father's throne We pour our ardent prayers; Our fears, our hopes, our aims are one, Our comforts and our cares. We share our mutual woes; Our mutual burdens bear; And often for each other flows The sympathizing tear. When we asunder part, It gives us inward pain; But we shall still be joined in heart, And hope to meet again. This glorious hope revives Our courage by the way; While each in expectation lives, And longs to see the day. From sorrow, toil, and pain, And sin, we shall be free; And perfect love and friendship reign Through all eternity.
Word & Song is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber.
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