It’s been a while since I’ve posted this lovely hymn, What a Friend We Have in Jesus–a Sunday school favorite. I wonder how many times Doc Watson has sung this hymn before an audience; and see, hear–it still has power to move him deeply.
But then it does that to a lot of us, doesn’t it?
A truer Friend one will never find!
Whenever I think about this hymn, I think about its author, Joseph Scriven. He was born of prosperous Irish parents in 1819. Graduated with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in 1842, and planned to wed his sweetheart. But tragedy struck, the night before their wedding, his fiancée was thrown from the horse she was riding and into a river, where she drowned. Overcome with grief, a number of months later he migrated to Canada in 1844.
When in Canada, he refocused his life to concentrate on living the lifestyle described by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount. He spent the rest of his life to tutoring, preaching, and helping others. He became a servant of the underprivileged, assisting the handicapped, the poverty-stricken, the ill, and the imprisoned. He cut and hauled wood for destitute families so they might survive the frigid winters of Port Hope, Ontario. He found love once again and planned to marry, but before the wedding took place, once more tragedy struck, the young woman contracted pneumonia and died. At the same time, his mother, back in Dublin was seriously ill, but he didn’t have the funds to finance a trip to see her. So he wrote three verses of a poem he titled “Pray without Ceasing” and sent them to his mother hoping they would lift her spirits and comfort her.
Sometime later, a friend visited Scriven when he was sick and saw the poem he had written to his mother. He had the poem published, Charles Converse, a well-known composer of that day, wrote a melody for the verses Scriven had penned. The hymn was retitled “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” after the first line of the text.
Scriven drowned in 1886 at age 66. At the time of his death, he was very ill with a fever and had been brought to a friend’s home to recover. It was a very hot night, and he may have possibly gone outside to cool down, or to get a drink of cold water from the spring. His friend reported, “We left him about midnight. I withdrew to an adjoining room to watch and pray. You may imagine my surprise and dismay when upon visiting his room I found it empty. All searches failed to find a trace of the missing man, until a little after noon his body was discovered in the nearby river, lifeless and cold in death.” He was buried next to his second fiancée in her family cemetery near Bewdley.