(from Philippians 2:6–11)
In the fullness of time Christ came empty prince?
built a tower of mustard seeds reigned
with a towel
And in time’s void He came brimming baskets
of bread for the hollow
blood for the penniless and
a tree to plant again
Eden.
SUSAN ZITZMAN
In 1873, when the sport of mountain climbing was still in its infancy, an enterprising young Englishwoman climbed most of the way to the summit of Europe’s highest mountain, Mont Blanc, to the place known as Les Grands Mulets. Her guide urged her to go on, as it seemed to him that she could easily attain the summit and incidentally become the first woman to do so. She demurred, stating that she had already accomplished what she intended, and that to go on would be nothing but vanity. That woman was Frances Ridley Havergal (b. 1836), one of the most gifted hymn writers in the English language. Her death occurred two days after Pentecost exactly a century ago, on June 3, 1879.
Those who know and love Frances Havergal’s hymns may not be surprised at the description given by one of her publishers: “a gentle spirit, a temperament alive to all innocent joys, to all the harmonies of life and literature, a deep and earnest faith, a loving self-surrender to the Savior.” Lines such as these: “Take my life, and let it be, …” and, “Golden harps are sounding, Angel voices ring, …” seem to speak of a submissive, contemplative nature. The rather more robust, “Like a river glorious,” and the stirring, “Who is on the Lord’s side?” bespeak a vigor that is acquainted with hard work and earnest struggle as well as with “all innocent joys.” And indeed, as Frances Havergal’s letters and personal accounts of her mountaineering in Britain and on the Continent show, she was indeed gentle—but certainly not weak.
During our own years in Switzerland my wife, Grace, and I hiked over many of the high mountain passes that used to be important travel routes in the days before the railroad. It was in 1971 that Grace picked up, in a library sale in Yeotmal, India, Frances Ridley Havergal’s Swiss Letters and we realized something of the real character of this remarkable woman. Even today, life in those high mountain regions is simple and hard. Today Switzerland is one of the most prosperous nations in the world, but in the nineteenth century it was poor, particularly in mountainous regions that have since then become the center of skiing and tourism. Through the Alps there run two boundaries: the French-German language boundary and the Protestant-Catholic boundary. Due to the historic Protestant-Catholic conflict, religious rivalry has remained strong, even to the present, but the quality of spiritual work and of ministry in the isolated valleys and their villages was poor.
It was in Frances Ridley Havergal’s Swiss Letters that we discovered that almost exactly one hundred years before us, when mountaineering was still in its infancy and the comfort of mountain inns and Swiss Alpine Club huts did not yet exist, she had hiked over most of the same high passes that we ventured. She did not stick to the mule trails, but went right up the peaks: “The snow slopes,” she writes, “were most entertaining to cross, and I enjoyed the scramble excessively.” In the light of the intense spiritual sensitivity to which her hymns bear witness, it is fascinating to observe her physical vitality and the zest she brings to life. An Alpine Club companion comments that she “went up like a chamois,” and she herself wrote, “The glissades down are simply delicious.” Such a glissade (controlled slide down a steep snow-covered slope without skis) almost cost her life and that of a companion on the descent from Mont Blanc.
Not only did Frances enjoy both physical and spiritual exertion, but like another mountain-based Francis—Francis Schaeffer—she kept them together. She referred to her hikes through Switzerland as “a working vacation.” Her work was the ministry of the Word, in speech, song, and visitation. Having learned both German and French as a girl and apparently possessing a real gift for languages, Frances was able to converse with the local people on both sides of the language border. As she hiked through the valleys and over the passes, she stopped in small towns and villages, distributing Gospels, preaching, and visiting shut-ins. She even composed a French hymn that is still found in many French-language hymnals.
Accounts of her life and her own letters tell so naturally and self-confidently of her faith, her devotional life, and her constant activity in witnessing, teaching, writing, and working, that one sometimes gains the impression that this came naturally and easily in Queen Victoria’s England. And although Frances makes it sound as though there could be nothing in the world more natural than standing “on the Lord’s side,” to “serve the King,” we know that she often took her stand and performed her service in a decidedly unfriendly environment. Although, like many impecunious English clergymen, her father was well-connected in upper-class circles, the consecration she shared with him was by no means typical of that class. Both in Britain and in Germany, the history of the nineteenth century abounds with examples of those who were noble and wealthy by birth, and who consecrated both life and fortune to the service not of earthly kings and Kaisers, but of the King of Heaven. This class was international in character, and Frances Havergal related as easily to peers and peeresses as to peasants. Both her ability to relate naturally and her clarity of spiritual conviction appear very early in her life.
When her father went to Germany in 1852 to consult an eye specialist, Frances at sixteen became a friend of the Countess zur Lippe. Lippe was an independent principality at that time, before the unification of Germany under Bismarck. Both the count and the countess were admirable representatives of German Pietism (as was Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert), and, as Frances writes, lived very simply, giving the majority of their ancestral income away. But the Count and Countess zur Lippe were no more typical of the German aristocracy than William Wilberforce was of the British upper class. Frances was enrolled for a time in an exclusive girls’ school in Düsseldorf, where, she reports—not without a trace of British pride—she astonished everyone by coming out first in her class. Yet there, she reports, among 110 girls, “I do not think there was one beside myself who cared for religion.” Her next comment is startling, but typical of the woman who could scale Mont Blanc: “This was very bracing.”
Back in Britain, Frances studied both biblical languages, developing a skill that helps to explain the fact that her hymns, although full of sentiment, are not basically sentimental but biblical. For almost every line she writes, however imaginative and poetic, there is a firm scriptural foundation. She does not write or sing of her experience in the first place—although she is very open about it—but of the Lord she serves. And her active study no more kept her from ministering to people of every condition than did her active vacationing in the mountains of Wales or Switzerland. She was active among village people, among farm workers, among sailors. She traveled to Ireland and ministered there as well, her generous spirit overcoming the handicap of hostility that would have overwhelmed the typical upper-class Briton in subject Ireland.
In almost any current American hymnal, Frances Ridley Havergal is well represented. Although her hymns are warm and fervent, they are anything but soupy. At a time when many evangelicals are becoming suspicious—and rightly so—of the syrupy emotionalism that characterizes many so-called “favorite hymns,” Havergal’s hymns offer an invaluable contrast. They show, more clearly perhaps than those of any other writer since Charles Wesley, that it is not necessary to resort to the emotional pressure-cooker contrivance of walks in the garden alone in order to sing warmly and fervently of the love of Jesus. Everything that we need or should want to say in the Christian life, if the sentiment is legitimate, can be drawn from Scripture without resort to religious fancy. At the same time, it can be beautiful and fervent. It is hard to select a single hymn from among her scores as an example, but surely these lines illustrate her combination of biblical accuracy and spiritual enthusiasm:
Thou art coming, O my Saviour, Thou art coming, O my King,
In thy beauty all resplendent; In thy glory all transcendent;
Well may we rejoice and sing:
Coming! in the opening east, Herald brightness slowly swells;
Coming! O my glorious Priest, Hear we not thy golden bells?
Harold O. J. Brown is professor of theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.
