It Is Well With My Soul

Tragedy preceded the writing of the words of this hymn and followed closely the composing of the music.

The French liner, “S.S. Ville du Havre,” was the most luxurious ship afloat when it sailed from New York in November, 1873. Among her passengers was Mrs. H.G. Spafford of Chicago, making the trip with her four children, Maggie, Tanetta, Annie and Bessie. Mr. Spafford was unable to make the voyage with his family because of business commitments in Chicago, so recently ravaged by the Great Fire. But, even though he was happy that his family was traveling on a ship with Christian companions, some last-minute premonition made him change the cabin they occupied to one toward the bow of the vessel. He told them “Goodbye,” promising to meet them in France in a few weeks.

At two o’clock on the morning of Novemeber 22, 1873, when the luxury liner was several days out, and sailing on a quiet sea, she was rammed by the English iron sailing vessel, the “Lochearn.” In two hours the “Ville du Havre,” one of the largest ships afloat, settled to the bottom of the ocean, with a loss of some two-hundred twenty-six lives, including the four Spafford children. Nine days later when the survivors landed in Cardiff, Wales, Mrs. Spafford cabled her husband these two words, “Saved alone.” When he received her message, he said to a dear friend, “I am glad to trust the Lord when it will cost me something.” For him it was the second time of testing, coming almost too soon upon the heals of the first. In the Chicago Fire he had lost everything he owned; in the tragedy at sea he had lost his four precious children. As soon as he could, he booked passage on a ship to Europe to join his wife. On the way over, in December of that same year, 1973, the Captain called him into his cabin and said, “I believe we are now passing over the place where the ‘Ville du Havre’ went down.”

That night he found it hard to sleep. But faith soon conquered doubt, and there, in the mid-Atlantic, out of his heart-break and pain, Mr. Spafford wrote five stanzas, the first of which contained these lines:

When they met some weeks later, Mrs. Spafford said, “I have not lost my children. We are only separated for a little time.”

Mr. Spafford and Philip Paul Bliss, song leader and composer, were not strangers. Both had been associated with Moody and Sankey in several of their evangelistic campaigns, and Bliss had led the singing on a few occasions when Spafford had been the speaker. At the request of the author, Bliss agreed to set Spafford’s poem to music. On the last Friday in November, 1876, in a meeting in Farwell Hall, Chicago, when more than a thousand ministers were gathered, Bliss introduced “It Is Well with my Soul” as a sacred solo. A month later, when the ink on the manuscript paper was hardly dry, Mr. andMrs. Bliss, leaving their two children with his mother, took a train from Buffalo, N.Y. enroute to Chicago, where a new series of services was scheduled to begin shortly after New Years Day. They left Buffalo on Friday, afternoon, December 29, 1876. At eight o’clock that night, while approaching Ashtabula, Ohio, a bridge crossing a ravine gave way and the train and its seven cars of passengers plunged into the icy river below. Fire broke out almost immediately, killing many who had escaped drowning, but were imprisoned by falling beams and twisted timbers. Of the one-hundred-sixty passengers, just fifty-nine bodies were eventually accounted for; there were only fourteen survivors. One of them reported that Bliss could have escaped, but, as his wife was hopelessly caught in the wreckage, he remained at her side, and together they met the onrushing flames and certain death. For three days his friends remained at the scene of the disaster, but they found nothing that could be identified with the thirty-eight-year-old song leader of his wife, although scores of articles were raked from the ashes and gathered from the bottom of the river.

They have no earthly grave – the four Spafford children who drowned in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and Mr. and Mrs. Bliss who perished in the train wreck in Ohio. But their hymn, which followed one tragedy and preceded another, lives forever in the hearts of Christian people, who rejoice that both the Spaffords and the Blisses could truthfully and triumphantly say,

“It is well, it is well with my soul.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkHeoM2Fys0

• taken from Living Stories of Famous Hymns, by Ernest K. Emurian, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Copyright 1955