All
of you old-timers like me who grew up in Baptist, Methodist, or other
“evangelical” churches know the name Fanny Crosby, the blind woman who wrote more
gospel songs/hymns than anyone else in history. She was born 200 years ago,
just about five weeks after Susan B. Anthony whom I wrote about last month.
Fanny’s
Blindness
Frances Jane Crosby was born about 75 miles north of New York City
on March 24, 1820. Throughout her long life—and she died shortly before her 95th
birthday in 1915—she went by the name Fanny.
When just a few weeks old, Fanny had an eye infection that an
incompetent doctor mistreated. Consequently, Fanny became blind for life. A few
months later, her father died and her mother, widowed at 21, had to go to work
as a maid.
Grandmother Eunice Crosby then took care of Fanny—and she taught the
precocious little girl that she could learn and excel in life despite being
blind. When Fanny was only eight or nine years old, she wrote the words that
appear under her picture on the right.
Just before her 14th birthday, she enrolled as a
student in the New York Institution for the Blind (NYIB, now the New York
Institute for Special Education).
Fanny was a student at NYIB for eight years and then taught there
for fifteen years, leaving in 1858, the year she married Alexander Van Alstyne,
who was also blind—and who had also been a student and then a teacher in the
same school.
While a teacher at NYIB, Fanny had the opportunity to recite some
of her poems before the U.S. Senate and later before a joint session of Congress—the
first woman to do either. She also became a friend of President James Polk, who
visited NYIB, and with Fanny, at least twice during his presidency, the last
time being in 1848.
In 1849 the cholera epidemic in the U.S. worsened, and Fanny
nursed children in the school. After she showed symptoms, she was asked to leave the
NYIB until autumn. She survived, but President Polk, whose term ended in
March, died of cholera in June of that year at the age of 53.
(Let’s pray that the epidemic of 2020 doesn’t turn out to be as
bad as the epidemic of 1848-49.)
Fanny’s Service
Although
she had written poetry for thirty years by the time of her marriage, it was
only a few years later that she began to write hymns—and write she did! She is
said to have written more than 9,000 gospel songs/hymns!
Many
of her hymns were regularly used in the highly popular evangelistic campaigns
of Dwight L. Moody and Ira Sankey. But hymn-writing was not what Fanny
considered her main mission in life.
According
to this website, Fanny “wanted most to be remembered as a home
missions worker to the poor.” She served in various New York City rescue
missions from the early 1860s to the first decade of the 1900s.
Chapter
18 of her book Fanny Crosby's Memories of Eighty Years is titled “Work
Among Missions,” and she writes of how her work at the well-known Bowery
Mission began in 1881.
(“Serving
Kings: The Bowery Mission in Manhattan at 140 Years” is an article in the
Winter 2020 Plough Quarterly, and it quotes words that Fanny often said
when speaking in the Bowery Mission chapel services.)
Evangelicals,
like Fanny, in the nineteenth century often combined loving service to people
in physical need with sharing a Gospel message for their spiritual needs.
Fanny’s
Hymns
Only a very few of Fanny’s many hymns can be
mentioned here. You who know her hymns have your own favorites, I’m sure, but
three of her most well-known hymns are also three of my favorites, and I sang
them often from when I was a boy until we went to Japan in 1968.
Those
three are “Rescue the Perishing” (1869), “Blessed Assurance” (1873), and “I Am
Thine, O Lord” (1875). According to Hymnary.org those hymns are currently found
in 693, 933, and 616 hymnals, respectively.
In
writing this article, I have especially enjoyed reading/hearing—and being
challenged by—the first two verses of the third hymn. You can read the lyrics of
that gospel song at this link or hear them
beautifully sung here.
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