Eternal Light! Eternal Light

Eternal Light! Eternal Light. Thomas Binney* (1798-1874). Written ca. 1826, during Binney’s ministry at Newport, Isle of Wight. According to a note on a manuscript copy ‘transcribed, from memory, for Mrs Edd Cook./ T.B./ Walworth, August 7th 1856’, it was ‘composed thirty years ago, while looking up at the sky, one brilliant star-light night’. The hymn came into general use with the Baptist Psalms and Hymns (1858), and into Congregational church use in the New Congregational Hymn Book (1859). In 1866 Binney recalled that the hymn had been ‘set to music and published… on behalf of some charitable object to which the profits went’, which suggests a leaflet form. It is based on 1 John 1-5,...