At thirty-eight, she was eleven years older than Van, as he was known. Eight years after this religious experience (conversion), she married Alexander van Alstine, a colleague and former student who was also blind. I sprang to my feet, shouting “Hallelujah.”Īs open as she was about her religious experience, Fanny remained mostly silent on her personal life. Issac Watts:Īnd when they reached the 3rd line of the last verse: “Here, Lord, I give myself away ‘Tis all that I can do.” I surrendered myself to the Saviour, and my very soul was flooded with celestial light. After prayer the congregation began to sing the grand old consecration hymn of Dr. Some of us went every evening, but although I sought peace, I could not find the joy I craved, until one evening – Novem– I arose and went forward alone. She attended revival meetings, but nothing happened, as she later wrote in her autobiography: She had struggled to break through to God for some time. Though raised by a pious Christian grandmother, Fanny did not date her conversion until 1850, when she was thirty years old. All the while, from girlhood through adulthood, she wrote poetry, publishing her first collection, The Blind Girl and Other Poems, in 1844. At age fifteen she left home to live at the New York Institution for the Blind, first as a student and later as a teacher. From that point on, she was raised primarily by her grandmother while her mother worked. Before her first birthday, her father died. With normal sight, she might never have become a hymn writer. It is more likely, however, that she was born blind. She would later say that she had the good fortune of being blind, a condition she insisted had developed when she was two months old, the result of a hot mustard poultice administered to cure her illness. As the story goes, she asked Fanny, What do you think the tune says?” Fanny, without hesitation responded: “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine.” Between 1870 and her death in 1915, Fanny Crosby wrote some eight thousand hymns, many of which are still found in hymnals and continue to be sung today, Including “Blessed Assurance,” “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior,” “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,” “Jesus, Keep Me near the Cross,” “Rescue the Perishing,” and “To God Be the Glory.” Though blind, she wrote of one day seeing – seeing “the bright and glorious morning” and viewing “His blessed face, and the luster of his kindly beaming eye.” Fanny was visiting the Knapp home when Pheobe played a tune she had composed. It was Pheobe who wrote the tune for one of Fanny’s most memorable hymns. Fanny often visited her at her New York mansion, where she enjoyed talking to another of Phoebe’s friends, Harriet Beecher Stowe. One of Fanny Crosby’s dearest friends was the hymn writer Phoebe Knapp, a wealthy woman some fifteen years younger than she.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |