Mark the soft falling snow

Representative Text

1 Mark the soft-falling snow,
And the descending rain!
To heaven, from whence it fell,
It turns not back again;
But waters earth through every pore,
And calls forth all her secret store.

2 Arrayed in beauteous green,
The hills and valleys shine,
And man and beast are fed
By providence divine:
The harvest bows its golden ears,
The copious seed of future years.

3 So, saith the God of grace,
My gospels shall descend,
Almighty to effect
The purpose I intend;
Millions of souls shall feel its power,
And bear it down to millions more.

Source: The Voice of Praise: a collection of hymns for the use of the Methodist Church #8

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Author: Philip Doddridge

Philip Doddridge (b. London, England, 1702; d. Lisbon, Portugal, 1751) belonged to the Non-conformist Church (not associated with the Church of England). Its members were frequently the focus of discrimination. Offered an education by a rich patron to prepare him for ordination in the Church of England, Doddridge chose instead to remain in the Non-conformist Church. For twenty years he pastored a poor parish in Northampton, where he opened an academy for training Non-conformist ministers and taught most of the subjects himself. Doddridge suffered from tuberculosis, and when Lady Huntington, one of his patrons, offered to finance a trip to Lisbon for his health, he is reputed to have said, "I can as well go to heaven from Lisbon as from Nort… Go to person page >

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First Line:	Mark the soft falling snow
Author:	Philip Doddridge
Meter:	6.6.6.6.8.8
Language:	English
Copyright:	Public Domain

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Notes

Mark the soft-falling snow. P. Doddridge. [Natural things emblematical of things Spiritual.] First pub.lished in J. Orton's posthumous ed. of Doddridge's Hymns, 1755, No. Ill, in 4 stanzas of 8 lines, and headed "Fruitful Showers, Emblems of the salutary Effects of the Gospel." In that and subsequent editions to 1839, the opening lines read:—

"Mark the soft-falling Snow,
And the diffusive Rain;
To Heav'n, from whence it fell,
It turns not back again."

In 1839 J. D. Humphreys, in reprinting the Hymns from the original manuscript corrected from the MS. of this hymn the grammatical error of “it” for "they" in these lines, and drew special attention thereto in the Preface to the Hymns, as evidence of his charge against Job Orton as a careless editor. Amongst modern collections the text of 1755 is retained in the Scottish Evangelical Union Hymnal, 1878, and that of the original MS. in Martineau's Hymns, 1840.

--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)

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