Emptied of earth, I fain would be

Author: Augustus Toplady

Toplady, Augustus Montague, the author of "Rock of Ages," was born at Farnham, Surrey, November 4, 1740. His father was an officer in the British army. His mother was a woman of remarkable piety. He prepared for the university at Westminster School, and subsequently was graduated at Trinity College, Dublin. While on a visit in Ireland in his sixteenth year he was awakened and converted at a service held in a barn in Codymain. The text was Ephesians ii. 13: "But now, in Christ Jesus, ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ." The preacher was an illiterate but warm-hearted layman named Morris. Concerning this experience Toplady wrote: "Strange that I, who had so long sat under the means of grace in England, should b… Go to person page >

Empty'd of earth I fain would be. A. M. Toplady. [Holiness desired.] First published in his Poems on Sacred Subjects, 1759, as No. 25 of the "Petitionary Hymns," and headed, "The Believer's Wish." In April, 1771, he included it in a revised form, in 10 stanzas of 4 lines, in the Gospel Magazine. This revised text is repeated in Sedgwick's reprint of Toplady's Hymns, 1860, p. 30, and is that in use in Great Britain and America. The cento from this hymn, "At anchor laid remote from home" (stanzas ix. and viii.), appeared in Rippon's Selection, 1787, and is still in common use. [William T. Brooke]

--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)