Robert Grant (b. Bengal, India, 1779; d. Dalpoorie, India, 1838) was influenced in writing this text by William Kethe’s paraphrase of Psalm 104 in the Anglo-Genevan Psalter (1561). Grant’s text was first published in Edward Bickersteth’s Christian Psalmody (1833) with several unauthorized alterations. In 1835 his original six-stanza text was published in Henry Elliott’s Psalm and Hymns (The original stanza 3 was omitted in Lift Up Your Hearts).
Of Scottish ancestry, Grant was born in India, where his father was a director of the East India Company. He attended Magdalen College, Cambridge, and was called to the bar in 1807. He had a distinguished public career a Governor of Bombay and as a member of the British Parliament, where… Go to person page >| First Line: | O Savior, whose mercy, severe in its kindness |
| Author: | Robert Grant |
| Language: | English |
| Copyright: | Public Domain |
O Saviour, Whose mercy severe in its kindness. Sir R. Grant. [Benefits of Affliction.] This poem is found in Sacred Poetry, 2nd Series, Edinburgh, W. Oliphant & Son, circa 1824, No. 149, in 8 stanzas of 4 lines, headed "Benefit of Affliction," and signed "Sir Robert Grant.” In Grant's posthumous Sacred Poems, 1839, it was given unaltered as No. v., with the text "Blessed is the man whom thou chastenest. Psalm xliv. 12." It is given in full in H. W. Beecher's Plymouth Collection, 1855, and other American hymnbooks. In the Boston Unitarian Hymns of the Spirit, 1864, No. 586, "I thought that the course of the pilgrim to heaven," is composed of stanzas v.-vii.
--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)
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