He Leadeth Me

Joseph Henry Gilmore, 1862

It’s one of the subtlest and most profound ironies of life, that you can love your country best when you see it as a pilgrim land, not the ultimate destination. Augustus Caesar, that cold and talented statesman, looked the other way while his subordinates encouraged people in the provinces to build temples to Augustus et Roma. The madness of Caligula and the villainy of Nero were not long in coming. The garnish may change, but the meal is the same, whenever the state supplants God as the greatest object in men’s minds. The twentieth century is instructive. The State is a ferocious idol, and in my own lifetime, just between Mao’s China and the Soviet Union with her puppet states, it ground up at least eighty million people in its relentless jaws.

One man who could testify to it was born in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, one of the poorest towns I have ever seen in America — dreadfully poor, once the coal-mining there came to a halt. His name was Father Walter Ciszek. He was serving as a priest in Poland during the Second World War, but when the Soviets came in with their occupying armies in 1941, he decided he would enter the Soviet Union along with the vast numbers of Polish exiles, to minister to them. Working as a logger in the Urals, under an alias, he performed religious services secretly, was arrested on the absurd charge of espionage, and then he spent his next 20 years in two Russian prison camps, the last 15 of them in a Siberian mining camp above the Arctic Circle and the tree line, hacking away with a pickax at the permafrost. As hard as that soil was, the human heart is harder, once it turns away from God and sets up an idol — in this case, the State — in his place. When Father Ciszek was finally released, at the urging of American diplomats, he wrote two memoirs of his years in the camp; the first one is called He Leadeth Me, taken from the first words of our much beloved Hymn of the Week, themselves a reference to that confident and grateful verse in Psalm 23: “He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness, even for his name’s sake.”

But where did the hymn come from? Here we go to March 26, 1862. The place is the First Baptist Church, in Philadelphia. The young man scheduled to preach, Joseph Henry Gilmore, wanted to encourage the people in the dark days upon them, for the Civil War was beginning its second year, and brother fought against brother, countryman against countryman. He decided that his text would be Psalm 23, but, as he told his wife, he could not get past the words, “He leadeth me.” That evening, after supper, he took out a piece of paper and jotted down the four verses of our hymn, gave them to his wife, and thought no more about them. But Mrs. Gilmore on the sly sent them to a publisher of religious poetry and hymns, and when the composer Joseph Bradbury found them, he set them to a melody — we know the melody by his name, BRADBURY — and the song found its way into a hymnal in New England. And still Gilmore knew nothing of the matter.

One year later, on November 26, 1863, we find Gilmore in a village then known as Fisherville, New Hampshire, about 20 miles from where I am writing these words. It is now called Pennacook, and most of it lies within the Concord city limits. There, speaking to several congregations coming together to hear him, Gilmore spoke about the dark times that were upon them, and the deaths of their bravest young men, but more, about how the hand of God had not departed from them. “Yet even in the fiery furnace of our affliction,” he said, “how often can the eye of faith discern a form like that of the Son of Man? God, during the past year, has thrown the pall of death more often than ever before over this little village. Again and again He has entered our households and took from us those who were dearer than life itself. But how sweetly has the morning star of consolation beamed forth from the night of gloom! How blessed the thought that more have passed from death unto life among us in the twelve-month than they who have passed from life unto death!” There, he said, in that abundant life, they “keep their thanksgiving in the presence of God.” And still he did not know about his own hymn.

He heard it for the first time only in 1866, the year after the war’s end, when he was in Rochester, New York, and he was astonished to see it in the hymnal, and with the music, too. How could this fellow Bradbury ever have gotten his hands on the poem? That’s when Mrs. Gilmore told her husband what she had done, and both he and she were delighted to see that it had touched the hearts of so many others. Bradbury, too, was a devout man and something of a prodigy, becoming an organist at age 18 after only one year of studying music. He soon became a composer of sacred music; he and his brother invented and constructed the Bradbury pianos, fashioned for a distinctive power and sweetness of tone, leaning towards the sound of the organ. Gilmore, along with his pastoral duties, became a college professor, teaching Hebrew, then English literature, rhetoric, and logic, publishing many books on those subjects. Bradbury, for his part, published hymnals for Sunday Schools — selling more than three million.

Yet the hymn is not about earthly success. It is about how God leads, as Milton puts it, “through the world’s wilderness long-wandering man / Safe to eternal Paradise of bliss.”

Once again we are fortunate to listen to our Hymn of the Week as sung by the enviable congregation and accompanied by the excellent organist at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California.

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He leadeth me, O blessed thought!
O words with heavenly comfort fraught!
Whate'er I do, where'er I be,
Still 'tis God's hand that leadeth me.

Refrain.  He leadeth me, he leadeth me!
By his own hand he leadeth me!
His faithful follower I would be,
For by his hand he leadeth me.

Sometimes 'mid scenes of deepest gloom,
Sometimes where Eden's bowers bloom,
By waters still, o'er troubled sea,
Still 'tis his hand that leadeth me.  Refrain.

Lord, I would clasp thy hand in mine,
Nor ever murmur nor repine,
Content, whatever lot I see,
Since 'tis my God that leadeth me.  Refrain.

And when my task on earth is done,
When by thy grace the victory's won,
E'en death's cold wave I will not flee,
Since God through Jordan leadeth me.  Refrain.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!

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