I Love to Tell the Story

Katherine Hankey, 1866

If you lived in Clapham, southwest of London, in the late 1700’s all the way to the middle of the 1800’s, you might easily get to know and to hear some of the most fervent, earnest, and self-denying Christian reformers in the history of the faith.  One of them was the tireless William Wilberforce, the single man most responsible for getting a sluggish British Parliament to repudiate the slave trade.  Wilberforce and his friend Thomas Charles inaugurated the British and Foreign Bible Society, to bring the story of salvation – and most especially the story of Christ, the Savior – to people who could not get a copy of the Bible in their native language.  It was called “British and Foreign” because plenty of British people themselves did not have such a Bible.  The Bible had been translated into Welsh all the way back in 1588 by a man named, what else, William Morgan, but I suppose it was out of print by then, and there were also speakers of Manx on the Isle of Man, and Gaelic in Scotland, and Irish in Ireland.  But you mustn’t think that they had mainly the British in mind, or the educated elites of other nations, or languages spoken by many millions of people.  They wanted everybody to have the story.  So, for example, the Society translated the Bible into Romani: that is, into one of the principal tongues of the Gypsies.

Nor were they content to say to themselves, “The slave trade is over as far as our country is concerned,” and leave it at that.  They settled many liberated slaves in Sierra Leone, whose capital is called Freetown, for that obvious reason.  They also undertook energetic missionary work in Africa – missionary, humanitarian, and educational, all three, and you will have a long, long wait of it if you wish to see secular people, at such cost and danger to themselves, do anything close to what they did.  And that brings us to the author of our hymn this week, Katherine Hankey, a member of the Clapham society, who set up many Sunday schools in her native land, and who later accompanied her brother as a missionary to South Africa.  In 1866, she was laid up with a long and severe illness, and while she was recovering – this too is a feature of her time, not ours – she wrote a poem called “The Old, Old Story,” whose simple stanzas concentrate the history of salvation, and the character and life of Jesus, into words that any child in Sunday School might understand, but that not the most learned person in the world can simply explain away:

 He lived a life most holy;
  His every thought was love,
And every action showed it,
  To man, and God above.

Of course I don’t have the space to go through the whole poem here, but the point is that Christians all are charged with telling the story, and it should be a joy to tell it, to share the glad tidings with other people, as Miss Hankey herself says:

And if this simple message
  Has now brought peace to you,
Make known "the old, old story,"
  For others need it too.

It sets us free, she says, and in glory we will be telling it and singing it, freely and fully and joyously.

The poem was quite popular – the very next year, in 1867, at a YMCA convention in Montreal, the hymn composer W. H. Doane heard a British general reciting it, and he said to himself that it would make a fine text set to music.  So he took some of the stanzas out, and he composed the melody for the hymn “Tell Me the Old, Old Story.”  And then in 1869, another American, a professor of music named William G. Fischer took other stanzas and composed his own melody for our hymn today.

We must imagine that you’d sing this hymn not to stand alone, but as getting ready to tell or to sing out the story that you love.  The point is that you do love it, and you share it in love, and if heaven is life filled with love, why should we not be singing out this story among ourselves and to the praise of God?  It will be, as the poet nicely says, ever ancient and ever new.

The Norman Luboff Choir, 1958.

I love to tell the story
of unseen things above,
of Jesus and His glory,
of Jesus and His love.
I love to tell the story,
because I know ’tis true;
it satisfies my longings
as nothing else will do.

Refrain.
I love to tell the story,
’twill be my theme in glory,
to tell the old, old story
of Jesus and his love.

I love to tell the story;
more wonderful it seems
than all my golden fancies
of all my golden dreams.
I love to tell the story,
it did so much for me,
and that is just the reason
I tell it now to thee.  

Refrain.

I love to tell the story;
’tis pleasant to repeat
what seems each time I tell it
more wonderfully sweet.
I love to tell the story,
for some have never heard
the message of salvation
from God’s most holy word. 

Refrain

I love to tell the story,
for those who know it best
seem hungering and thirsting
to hear it like the rest.
And when, in scenes of glory,
I sing the new, new song,
’twill be the old, old story
that I have loved so long.  

Refrain.