I am not skilled to understand

I am not skilled to understand. Dora Greenwell* (1821-1882). From Greenwell’s Songs of Salvation, a small collection of evangelical hymns published in 1873. This was the second hymn, entitled ‘Redemption’. It had ten stanzas. It is the only one of that collection to have become widely known. Its opening declaration is a reminder that Greenwell was living in a world in which the theology was made by men. The hymn can be taken as a straightforward concentration on Christ as Saviour, but it can also be seen as the cry of a woman whose education was unsystematic, and whose writing was belittled by her patronising brother William, a Canon of Durham Cathedral. The hymn deserves to be taken as a...