He Leadeth Me
Composer: Benjamin Wegner (MorningStar Music Publishers)
Text: Joseph H. Gilmore (1862)
Season: Sung November 16, 2025, Beverly Heights Sanctuary Choir with soloists
Joseph Gilmore was twenty-eight and filling a pulpit in Philadelphia in the spring of 1862 when he preached on Psalm 23 and found he could not get past the words “he leadeth me.” The Civil War was in its second year and the city was anxious. After the service, still turning the phrase over at a friend’s house, he wrote the four stanzas in a few minutes and handed them to his wife, who sent them to a Boston paper without telling him. William Bradbury’s tune made the hymn famous two years later, and Gilmore first heard it sung by a congregation in Rochester, New York, three years after he wrote it.
The hymn’s strength is its refusal to argue. It does not explain suffering; it says that God’s hand is the same hand in the gloom and in the garden, by calm waters and on a troubled sea, and that it will not let go even at the Jordan. Benjamin Wegner’s setting leaves Bradbury’s tune aside and gives Gilmore’s words a new, flowing melody of its own, with parts of the hymn carried by solo voices.
Scripture: Psalm 23; Psalm 73:23 and 24