The Primitive Methodists are the connection between the two variants. Taylor wrote for the Amerrican camp meeting movement which sired a denomination in England known as the Primitive ("first order") Methodists. Published originally in the form of a songster (pamphlet) entitled Spiritual Songs, "O Jesus, my Savior, I know thou art mine" was soon reprinted in other publications, widely used in both American camp meetings and in the similar movement they inspired in England. When expelled by the Wesleyans over camp meetings, the Primitive Methodists incorporated separately.

The phenomenon of the American rural open air camp meeting was introduced to England in 1805 by American itinerant preacher Lorenzo Dow, who proved wildly popular; two years after landfall and subsequent evangelizing, camp meetings commenced in England and caught on immediately. This occasioned a division among Methodists. Wesleyan congregations refused to admit the supposed rabble of open air converts to their now mature Wesleyan churches, which were ironically founded in just such a movement - prominently and literally a foundry.

After four years of unsanctioned camp meetings, the Primitive Methodists separated (1811) and established itinerant preaching circuits of their own and a single transatlantic mission emerged. As the industrial revolution gathered steam, emigrés from England had begun working in American mines and factories, their spiritual needs attended by missionaries from home. An 1819 account two years posthumously of Taylor's contributions to hymn singing noted that it was common for pages to be torn out of the songsters and carried as separate sheets (passage in image below), which might explain one way the hymn might have arrived in England - in the pockets of returning missionaries. It is also entirely possible that Lorenzo Dow, who was known to have brought literature with him, brought along copies of Taylor's Spiritual Songs in his 1805-1807 visit, or included it in his own camp meeting hymnal.

Caleb Jarvis Taylor was born 1763 into a Roman Catholic family in Maryland, converted at age 20, and a few years later founded Mount Gilead Methodist Church in what was then a frontier state, the Commonwealth of Kentucky...in Bourbon County, now famed for its whiskey. He is the author of several hymns (Hymnary.org lists 26), many still sung today, including the original. He was highly regarded both as preacher and hymnwriter by the English, and his original version was documented as circulating in England during the period of joint organization. Forty-two years after his death, an 1859 article on the camp meeting songwriters devoted several pages to his biography, noting particularly his poetic contribution.

Winks and Antliff, the publishers who separately produced the 1862 versions with the new incipit, were in friendly competition contemporaneously - not only with their denominational flagship magazines, but with related children's' editions, though the longer version in Winks was for an Arminian journal instead, a theological position consonant with Methodists. Since neither provided attribution, we can't be sure that one or the other didn't write both of them, or whether there is a synoptic Q version yet undiscovered supplying some proportion of the hymn not written by Taylor. Though both editors published a great deal of poetry, it can't be said that either was recognized as a poet; however, Antliff to that point had been actively editing poetry and prose, and later a biography of Lorenzo Dow. In his foreword to The Village and Other Poems (James Dodd, 1853), Antliff, the book's editor, wrote "Any boy may string words together so as to make a tinkling, jingling, sound ; but your true poet will not find this meet his taste ; he will ask for feeling, sentiment, real living poetic heat." This tells you how he would have regarded a one-and-done submission.

The earlier Winks printing has the feel of a work in progress, the hymn under Antliff's editorship is a finished piece - it is polished, has a clear theological cadence, and matches the version we sing today. Both shared a deep interest in children's literature, and struggled deeply to explain to a young audience why children die. It is reasonable to conclude the work was intended from the outset for a young audience - this, at least, is how Antliff positioned the work in his two subsequent printings. This might explain the hymn's final reduction to the purely familiar voice, which lends a sense of hope and immediacy.

With the addition of the young Hurditch to late-career Winks and mid-career Antliff, the evolution of this hymn involved a trio of professional communicators with shared commitments to theological, educational, literary, pedagogical and organizational objectives. In the midst of significant changes in copyright laws, they managed budgets and networks of printers, binders, typographers, and engravers. They were preachers, they founded schools, they led entire organizations - these were talented and enterprising creators. This is how organizational editing is done.

This circuitous process may not be either miracle story we've been told, but it is nonetheless a miracle, not only because we possess such a hymn, but that such a shimmering hymn possesses us.

The authoritative The Dictionary of Hymnology listed "My Jesus I love thee" as anonymous in 1902, but explicitly documented the connection between the Taylor's original and Antliff's unsigned version (see the inset image above). A scan of numerous hymnals through 1909 credits the source as The London Hymn Book exclusively, though in our view, this attribution really belongs to The Primitive Methodist Magazine, or more particularly its editor William Antliff, who published the hymn three times between 1862 and 1864 with 98.6% of our current versification. The London Hymn Book of 1864 makes a final revision of only two words.

Thus, our colophon reads:
Text: composite, ed. William Antliff (1862), after Caleb Jarvis Taylor (1804) and others s.n. | Music: Adoniram Judson Gordon, 1872

© David Maurand. This additional commentary CC BY-SA 4.0

This is not the first hymn or tune giftwrapped in a completely fictitious backstory, fabricated to give the work an aura of otherworldly origin to improve public acceptance. We have debunked a couple others on this site, notably ST. JOAN and GARDINER (which you may know as Germany or Beethoven). The hymn Abide with me likewise has two mutually exclusive origin myths created by the hymn's own writer, Henry Francis Lyte.

This all-too-common ploy may, in this instance, have a Boston connection involving one of A.J. Gordon's organists.

In 1876, after two years as organist at Gordon's Clarendon Street Baptist Church, George Coles Stebbins left to take up the position at the Baptist church a mile away now known as Tremont Temple. There he teamed up with with Dwight Moody and hymn writer/publisher Ira Sankey, no strangers to self-promotion; this trio traveled extensively together, and... did Stebbins introduce Sankey to the hymn? It was Sankey who injected the "Featherstone" exploit into the hymnological ecosystem, possibly to sell more of his own hymn books by his magically 'discovering' its 'true' author. That he couldn't even be bothered to get the name right, not even the middle name which he misspelled "Ralf", nor the supposed dates, betrays a remarkable lack of concern, if not outright contempt, for authenticity or authorial integrity.

Sad to say, it has worked brilliantly. The myth has become part and parcel of the hymn itself while the true creators have been forgotten. Even A.J. Gordon didn't pretend to know where this hymn came from.

David Maurand CC BY-SA 4.0