Take Time To Be Holy: A Song History
The words of “Take Time To Be Holy” came from William Dunn Longstaff (1822–1894), a layman of Sunderland, County Durham, England, and a shipowner's son of independent means.[1] He served as treasurer of Bethesda Free Chapel, the Sunderland congregation of his friend the Welsh preacher Arthur A. Rees, and he helped raise the money behind the British campaigns of the American evangelists Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey after their arrival in 1873.[1][2] Both accounts consulted here tie the hymn to words of Griffith John, a missionary to China, on 1 Peter 1:16, heard at a meeting in Keswick, though one treats it as the occasion of Longstaff's conversion and the other as the spark for the verses.[1][2] Hymnary.org dates the text to about 1882.[3]
George Washington Wilson, Derwent-Water, from Friar's Crag, Keswick, England (No. 582), albumen silver print, 1860s. Derwentwater seen from near Keswick, where Griffith John's words that lie behind the hymn were heard at a meeting; the photograph has no connection to the hymn.
Longstaff passed the poem to Sankey, who gave it to George Coles Stebbins (1846–1945), a singing teacher trained in Buffalo and Rochester, New York, who later took part in Moody's evangelistic campaigns.[1][4] How the tune, known as HOLINESS, came about is less settled. In C. Michael Hawn's telling, the text reached Stebbins in 1882, he laid it aside until an evangelistic meeting in India on the theme of holiness, set it for that revival, and Sankey then printed it in New Songs and Sacred Solos (1888).[2] Hymnary.org, by contrast, dates the tune to 1890 and places Stebbins's year of evangelism in India around 1900, so the sources differ on the timeline.[4][5]
The hymn has appeared in American Methodist hymnals since 1901 and is No. 395 in The United Methodist Hymnal, still sung to Stebbins's melody.[2][6] Hymnary.org counts it in several hundred hymnals, where HOLINESS is its usual partner, although a few books pair the words with other tunes.[3][5] Shelley Stevens sets it as a mountain dulcimer duet in DAD tuning in Baker's Dozen #11: Hymns For Two, a book of thirteen mountain dulcimer duet arrangements in both standard notation and tablature, published by Fingers Of Steel.[7]
Sources
- Hymnary.org: "William D. Longstaff".
- Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: 'Take Time to Be Holy'".
- Hymnary.org: "Take Time to Be Holy".
- Hymnary.org: "George C. Stebbins".
- Hymnary.org: "HOLINESS (Stebbins)".
- Hymnary.org: "The United Methodist Hymnal, 395. Take Time to Be Holy".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Baker's Dozen #11: Hymns For Two (Duets)".
- Image: George Washington Wilson, Derwent-Water, from Friar's Crag, Keswick, England (No. 582), albumen silver print, 1860s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.