All Things are Thine

John Greenleaf Whittier

I’m quite fond of the gentle and sweetly patriotic New England Quaker, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier.  You might almost say that there’s a complete separation between a people who honored Whittier, with his clean heart, his simple verse, his childlike vision, and his moral probity, and a people who honor – well, the foul, angry, and nasty entertainers we honor now.  It’s a mark of his breadth of mind and feeling that his poems can grace hymnals of many denominations, without falling afoul of anyone’s theology, because his fundamental faith was profoundly personal, and not an intellectual game.  Whittier lay all his trust in the Fatherhood of God, and he saw the utter poverty of man without the Father’s grace.
     Our hymn here is a case in point.  “All things are thine,” he says – and be sure that it’s thine in your hymnal, because if it’s yours, the editors have mangled the poem and left it a bloody mess.  Because all things come from God and belong to him, we have nothing o…