He leadeth me! O blessed thought

He leadeth me! O blessed thought. Joseph H. Gilmore* (1834-1918). Written after giving a sermon on Psalm 23 ( verse 2b, ‘he leadeth me beside the still waters’) as a visiting preacher at First Baptist Church, Philadelphia, on 26 March 1862, when Gilmore was newly ordained, and during the Civil War. The author wrote: I set out to give the people an exposition of the 23rd Psalm, which I had given before on three or four occasions, but this time I did not get further than the words ‘‘He Leadeth Me.’’ Those words took hold of me as they had never done before. I saw in them a significance and beauty of which I had never dreamed (quoted in Young, 1993, p. 390). It was published under an alias,...