One of the classic hymns of an earlier day is “My Faith Looks Up To Thee”. The melody was written by Lowell Mason (1792-1872). Ray Palmer (1808-1887) wrote the lyrics:

My faith looks up to Thee;
Thou Lamb of Calvary;
Savior divine;
Now hear me while I pray;
Take all my guilt away;
O let me from this day be wholly Thine…

Ray Palmer was a Congregationalist minister, who graduated from Yale in 1830. According to Ernest E Ryden, author of Story of our hymns (1930; online here at CCEL.org), Palmer wrote these lyrics shortly after his graduation while working as a tutor at a New York school.  He was reading a German poem, and dashed some stanzas into a notebook  He was contemplating what it would be like to be a penitent sinner standing at the foot of the cross of Jesus.

Later, when Lowell Mason was compiling a hymn collection, he happened across Rev. Palmer on a street in Boston. Palmer had by then established a reputation as a decent poet, so Mason asked him to write something for a new hymnal. Palmer dug out his old notebook and gave him the lyrics.  Mason praised his work. “You may live many years and do many good things, but I think you will be best known to posterity as the author of My Faith Looks Up to Thee.”  Mr. Ryden has called the hymn “the most precious contribution which American genius has yet made to the hymnology of the Christian Church”.

I will tell another story. Nestled into the bucolic setting of the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, near Knoxville, is Johnson University (formerly Johnson Bible College). This small, nondenominational college was founded in 1893 as the School of the Evangelists. It was and is a symbol of frontier faith and zeal, which emanated out of the revivalist fervor of the “Second Great Awakening”. In 1904 the college suffered a major blow when a fire broke out and burned the Main Building to the ground.  Local lore has it that even as their dreams went up in smoke, the faculty and students held hands and sang this hymn together. (They were able to rebuild the following year).

The performance below is by an anonymous group of singers, performing an arrangement by Fred Waring; it is used in accordance with Creative Commons licensing, from the Internet Archive.

Here also is a lovely piano version, uploaded by someone named “HouseOfJoel”, also available in the Creative Commons section of the Internet Archives.