I Will Sing of My Redeemer

For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's.

1 Corinthians 6:20

As a ten-year-old boy, when Philip Paul Bliss heard the sounds of a piano for the first time, his imagination was deeply stirred. Later, riding his horse, Old Fanny, he had become a traveling musician. In 1870, he joined the staff of a Chicago church. In March, 1874, he became the song leader for the evangelistic campaigns of Major Daniel W. Whittle. All the while, Philip was penning some of America's favorite gospel songs.

By the end of 1876, Philip needed a break. He had just written the music to "It is Well With My Soul," and finished a whirlwind tour of meetings with Major Whittle. While he and his wife Lucy were spending the Christmas holidays with his family in Pennsylvania, a telegram arrived requesting they come to Chicago to sing.

On December 29, 1876, leaving their two small children with Philip's mother, they boarded the Pacific Express. The snow was blinding, and the eleven-coach train was running about three hours late. About eight o'clock that night as the train creaked over a chasm near Ashtabula, Ohio, the trestle bridge collapsed. The engine reached solid ground on the other side of the bridge, but the other cars plunged 75 feet into the ravine.

Philip survived the crash and crawled out through a window. But within moments, fire broke out, and Lucy was still inside, pinned under the twisted metal of the iron seats. The other survivors urged Philip not to crawl back into the flaming wreckage. "If I cannot save her, I will perish with her," he shouted, plunging into the fiery car. Both Philip and Lucy died. He was thirty-eight.

Philip's trunk finally arrived in Chicago safely. In it were found the words to the last hymns he had written, one of which was:

I will sing of my Redeemer;

And His wondrous love for me;

On the cruel cross He suffered,

From the curse to set me free.

Sing, oh sing, of my Redeemer,

With His blood, He purchased me.

On the cross, He sealed my pardon,

Paid a debt, and made me free.

Taken from the book: Then Sings My Soul