Children of the Heavenly Father

Children of the Heavenly Father. Lina Sandell-Berg* (1832-1903), translated by Ernst W. Olson.  Many commentaries on this hymn state that Sandell-Berg wrote the original Swedish hymn ‘Tryggare kan ingen vara’ in 1858 as a result of her father’s tragic death by drowning. Per Harling*, author of Sandell's most recent biography, Blott en dag: Lina Sandell og hennes sanger (Stockholm, 2004), drawing upon research by Swedish hymnologist Oscar Lövgren, suggests that Sandell wrote the hymn much earlier, around 1850 when she was only 17 or 18 years of age:   By the end of the 1840s and the beginning of the 50s Europe was… chang[ing]…. In France the February revolution riots in Paris in 1848 had...