What is the thing of greatest price

Top Media Text Author Text Info Notes Tune Timeline Arrangements Page Scans Instances

What is the thing of greatest price

Author: James Montgomery
Published in 87 hymnals

Printable scores: PDF, MusicXML
Audio files: MIDI

Piano/Organ
	I'll Praise My Maker - Three Hymn Settin…

Representative Text

1 What is the thing of greatest price,
The whole creation round?--
That which was lost in Paradise,
That which in Christ is found.

2 The soul of man--Jehovah's breath--
That keeps two worlds at strife;
Hell moves beneath to work its death,
Heaven stoops to give it life.

3 And is this treasure borne below,
In earthen vessels frail?
Can non its utmost value know,
'Till flesh and spirit fail?

4 Then let us gather round the cross,
That knowledge to obtain;
Not by the soul's eternal loss,
But everlasting gain.

Source: The Voice of Praise: a collection of hymns for the use of the Methodist Church #374

All representative texts • Compare texts ^ top

Author: James Montgomery

James Montgomery (b. Irvine, Ayrshire, Scotland, 1771; d. Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, 1854), the son of Moravian parents who died on a West Indies mission field while he was in boarding school, Montgomery inherited a strong religious bent, a passion for missions, and an independent mind. He was editor of the Sheffield Iris (1796-1827), a newspaper that sometimes espoused radical causes. Montgomery was imprisoned briefly when he printed a song that celebrated the fall of the Bastille and again when he described a riot in Sheffield that reflected unfavorably on a military commander. He also protested against slavery, the lot of boy chimney sweeps, and lotteries. Associated with Christians of various persuasions, Montgomery supported missio… Go to person page >

^ top

First Line:	What is the thing of greatest price
Author:	James Montgomery
Meter:	8.6.8.6
Language:	English
Copyright:	Public Domain

^ top

Notes

What is the thing of highest [greatest] price? J. Montgomery. [The Soul.] Published in his Christian Psalmist, 1825, No. 504, in 6 stanzas of 4 lines; and again in his Original Hymns, 1853. It is found' in a few modern books in Great Britain and America.

--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)

^ top

Tune

BURLINGTON (Burrowes)

FRIEND (O'Kane)

MARTYRDOM (Wilson)

MARTYRDOM was originally an eighteenth-century Scottish folk melody used for the ballad "Helen of Kirkconnel." Hugh Wilson (b. Fenwick, Ayrshire, Scotland, c. 1766; d. Duntocher, Scotland, 1824) adapted MARTYRDOM into a hymn tune in duple meter around 1800. A triple-meter version of the tune was fir…

Go to tune page >

All tunes published with 'What is the thing of greatest price'^ top