Fanny Crosby – Testimony

It’s a small world. One of Fanny Crosby’s dearest friends was the hymn writer Phoebe Knapp, a wealthy woman some fifteen years younger than she. Fanny often visited her at her New York mansion, where she enjoyed talking to another of Phoebe’s friends, Harriet Beecher Stowe. It was Pheobe who wrote the tune for one of Fanny’s most memorable hymns. Fanny was visiting the Knapp home when Pheobe played a tune she had composed. As the story goes, she asked Fanny, What do you think the tune says?” Fanny, without hesitation responded: “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine.” Between 1870 and her death in 1915, Fanny Crosby wrote some eight thousand hymns, many of which are still found in hymnals and continue to be sung today, Including “Blessed Assurance,” “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior,” “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,” “Jesus, Keep Me near the Cross,” “Rescue the Perishing,” and “To God Be the Glory.” Though blind, she wrote of one day seeing – seeing “the bright and glorious morning” and viewing “His blessed face, and the luster of his kindly beaming eye.”

She would later say that she had the good fortune of being blind, a condition she insisted had developed when she was two months old, the result of a hot mustard poultice administered to cure her illness. It is more likely, however, that she was born blind. Perhaps it was her good fortune. With normal sight, she might never have become a hymn writer. Before her first birthday, her father died. From that point on, she was raised primarily by her grandmother while her mother worked. At age fifteen she left home to live at the New York Institution for the Blind, first as a student and later as a teacher. All the while, from girlhood through adulthood, she wrote poetry, publishing her first collection, The Blind Girl and Other Poems, in 1844.

Though raised by a pious Christian grandmother, Fanny did not date her conversion until 1850, when she was thirty years old. She had struggled to break through to God for some time. She attended revival meetings, but nothing happened, as she later wrote in her autobiography:

Some of us went every evening, but although I sought peace, I could not find the joy I craved, until one evening – November 20, 1850 – I arose and went forward alone. After prayer the congregation began to sing the grand old consecration hymn of Dr. Issac Watts:

Alas and did my Saviour bleed?

And did my Sovereign die? Would

He devote that sacred Head

For such a worm as I?

And when they reached the 3rd line of the last verse: “Here, Lord, I give myself away; ‘Tis all that I can do.” I surrendered myself to the Saviour, and my very soul was flooded with celestial light. I sprang to my feet, shouting “Hallelujah.”

As open as she was about her religious experience, Fanny remained mostly silent on her personal life. Eight years after this religious experience (conversion), she married Alexander van Alstine, a colleague and former student who was also blind. At thirty-eight, she was eleven years older than Van, as he was known. Of him she wrote: “He was a firm trustful Christian, a man of kindly deeds and cheering words. Our tastes were congenial, and he composed the music to several of my hymns. At different times he was organist in two of the New York Churches; he also taught private classes in both vocal and instrumental music. We were happy together for many years.”

For most of their married life, however, they lived separately, Another very private matter was the birth of their only child. Of that she later wrote: “God gave us a tender babe, (but soon) the angels came down and took our infant up to God and His thone.” In the years that followed the death of her infant, Fanny focused her attention on poetry, particularly the cause of the Civil War, writing one patriotic song after another, some of them with a tone of mockery, as was true in her “Song to Jeff Davis:

Now, Jeff, when thou art ready,

Lead on thy rebel crew,

We’ll give them all a welcome –

With balls and powder too!

We spurn thy constitution!

We spurn thy southern laws!

Our starts and stripes are waving,

And Heav’n will speed our cause.

In 1864 Fanny teamed up with William Bradbury, a move that launched her ministry as a hymn writer. For the next four decades until her death in 1915, she wrote as many as seven hymns a day. She was driven, though she testified that she always prayed for inspiration before she began writing …

One of the most popular hymns she wrote was “Pass Me Not” – called for at every meeting of the 1874 Moody – Sankey Campaign in London. Indeed, it was credited with saving more souls than any other hymn. But Fanny did not believe that hymn writing should be her only means of saving souls. In fact, she regarded her rescue mission work at several different locations in New York City as her primary ministry. She found housing near a mission in a low-rent neighborhood and spent little on herself, giving generously to the poor.

When she was in her nineties, she moved to Connecticut to live with a niece. Her admirers made pilgrimages simply to see and talk with the old lady who wrote hymns. It was their good fortune when she would sit at the piano and play for them a favorite, often adding a bit of unexpected rhythm and flare.

• excerpted from Extraordinary Women of Christian History: What We Can Learn From Their Struggles And Triumphs, Ruth A Tucker, Baker Books, 2016

Please feel free to share your favorite song or story about Fanny Crosby and how that song or story has had an impact on your life. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section to share with others.