Attempting to Understand

7. To God Be the Glory
by Fanny Crosby

Being blind didn’t prevent Fanny Crosby from being the most prolific hymn writer of all time. Her memory was so astute she could retain the verses of some 40 hymns before having to write them down. In the early 1870s, Crosby wrote “To God Be the Glory.” Thanks to two evangelists—D.L. Moody, who with Ira Sankey, introduced it in Great Britain in 1873, and Billy Graham, who showcased the hymn in 1954 at the Greater London Crusade before bringing it back home, the hymn was embraced by the masses.

Taken from www.ChristianityToday.com
http://www.christianitytoday.com/tc/2001/005/4.48.html

8. Majesty
by Jack Hayford

In 1977, Jack Hayford, founding pastor of The Church on the Way in Van Nuys, California, and his wife, Anna, were on a two-week vacation meandering through Scotland, Wales, and England. At Blenheim Palace, the massive estate built in the early eighteenth century for John Churchill, the first duke of Marlborough and ancestor of the future prime minister, Hayford summed up the stunning surroundings with a single sentence: “There is majesty in all this.” Hayford couldn’t stop thinking about the word majesty.

As his thoughts turned to a higher Ruler, a worshipful praise song emerged.

Taken from www.ChristianityToday.com
http://www.christianitytoday.com/tc/2001/005/4.48.html

This hymn written by poet-bishop Heber is sometimes called a metrical paraphrase of Revelation 4:8-11. A member of a distinguished Yorkshire family, Heber graduated from Oxford, where he showed his writing talent with an award-winning poem. For 16 years, Heber served as a parish priest in an obscure Anglican church in Hodnet. He wrote “Holy, Holy, Holy” for Trinity Sunday; the text was published in 1826. Heber then accepted a call as the bishop of Calcutta, India, where he died three years later.

Alfred Lord Tennyson considered “Holy, Holy, Holy” the finest hymn ever written.

Taken from www.ChristianityToday.com
http://www.christianitytoday.com/tc/2001/005/4.48.html