My Jesus I Love Thee


My Jesus I Love Thee appeared twice in 1862, first in ' edited by Joseph Foulkes Winks, then in October in ' edited by - who published the same version the following two years in works for children, one in the ', 1863, and one in the Primitive Methodists' Sabbath School Hymns, 1864.. This version is, save for a two-word edit in The London Hymn Book, the version we sing today. All five appearances, including three by Antliff, bear no attribution, nor does the 1872 setting by Adoniram Judson Gordon. Several lines and phrases of this poem are borrowed nearly verbatim from the hymn ' by Kentucky camp meeting evangelist Caleb Jarvis Taylor, published in 1804; the camp meeting is the connection with England's Primitive Methodists, of which William Antliff was a leading figure at the time this hymn emerged.
Though the poem is said to have been written by William Ralph Featherston in 1864 when he was alleged to have been 16 years old, the hymn had already appeared two years earlier, and his is actually three years later than the legend has it - he would have been 12 years old. No evidence has ever been provided of his authorship, and though the legend appears in the UK version of Ira D. Sankey's 1906 memoir My Life and Sacred Songs, the attribution is entirely absent from the US version published simultaneously in and in a longer edition a year later in 1907 of My life and the story of the gospel hymns and of sacred songs and solos, in which his attribution is Anonymous.
This hymn is used as the basis for the song Imandra by Ananias Davisson in the Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony in 1820, reprinted in Southern Harmony in 1835. There are other similarities between this poem and camp-meeting songs published in the 1820s onward.
In 1872 Adoniram Judson Gordon wrote a new setting to this hymn, published in . This tune was posthumously named GORDON. A.J. Gordon is also the founder of and .

Inspiration

According to Tim Challies,
The United Methodist Church's Hymns of the United Methodist Church, a guide to the denomination's hymnal, states that Featherstone was 16 years old when he wrote the text in 1864. Kenneth Osbeck writes of this hymn in his book, 101 More Hymn Stories: "It is difficult to realize that this beloved devotional hymn, which expresses so profoundly a believer's love and gratitude to Christ ... was written by a teenager".

Notable recordings