No face was so bright, no heart more true, And none were so sweet as he; -and as the congregation caught up the refrain,— O where is my boy tonight? O where is my boy tonight? My heart o'erflows, for I love him he knows, O where is my boy tonight? -a young man who had been sitting in a back seat made his way up the aisle and sobbed, "Mother, I'm here!" The embrace of that mother and her long-lost boy turned the service into a general hallelujah. At the inquiry meeting that night there were many souls at the Mercy Seat who never knelt there before--and the young wanderer was one. Mr. Sankey, when in California with Mr. Moody, sang this hymn in one of the meetings and told the story of a mother in the far east who had commissioned him to search for her missing son. By a happy providence the son was in the houseand the story and the song sent him home repentant. At another time Mr. Sankey sang the same hymn from the steps of a snow-bound train, and a man between whose father and himself had been trouble and a separation, was touched, and returned to be reconciled after an absence of twenty years. At one evening service in Stanberry, Mo., the singing of the hymn by the leader of the choir led to the conversion of one boy who was present, and whose parents were that night praying for him in an eastern state, and inspired such earnest prayer in the hearts of two other runaway boys' parents that the same answer followed. There would not be room in a dozen pages to record all the similar saving incidents connected with the singing of "Where Is My Wandering Boy?" The rhetoric of love is strong in every note and syllable of the solo, and the tender chorus of voices swells the song to heaven like an antiphonal prayer. Strange to say, Dr. Lowry set lightly by his hymns and tunes, and deprecated much mention of them though he could not deny their success. An active Christian since seventeen years of age, through his early pulpit service, his six years' professorship, and the long pastorate in Plainfield, N. J., closed by his death, he considered preaching to be his supreme function as it certainly was his first love. Music was to him "a side-issue," an "efflorescence," and writing a hymn ranked far below making and delivering a sermon. "I felt a sort of meanness when I began to be known as a composer," he said. And yet he was the author of a hymn and tune which "has done more to bring back wandering boys than any other" ever written.* *Where Is My Boy Tonight" was composed for a book of temperance hymns, The Fountain of Song, 1877. "ETERNITY.” This is the title and refrain of both Mrs. Ellen M. H. Gates' impressive poem and its tune. O the clanging bells of Time! Night and day they never cease; For they do not bring us peace. And we strain our eyes to see Skill was needed to vocalize this great word, but the ear of Mr. Bliss for musical prosody did not fail to make it effective. After the beautiful harmony through the seven lines, the choral reverently softens under the rallentando of the closing bars, and dwelling on the awe-inspiring syllables, solemnly dies away. TRIUMPH BY AND BY. This rally-song of the Christian arena is wonderfully stirring, especially in great meetings, for it sings best in full choral volume. |