Rise up, O men of God

Rise up, O men of God. William Pierson Merrill* (1867-1954). Written in 1911 for the Presbyterian Brotherhood Movement at the suggestion of Nolan R. Best, editor of the Presbyterian newspaper, The Continent. It was also influenced by an article by Gerald Stanley Lee entitled ‘The Church of the Strong Men’. Merrill said that he wrote it on a Lake Michigan steamer on the way to his church in Chicago ‘almost without thought and effort’. It was published in The Continent, 16 February 1911, and then in Hymns of the Centuries (1911), a Baptist hymnal edited by Benjamin Shepard. The reiterated use of ‘men’ and ‘brotherhood’ in this hymn have made it unacceptable to the compilers of hymnbooks in...