Servant of God, well done

Servant of God, well done. James Montgomery (1771-1854). First published in Montgomery’s Greenland, and other poems (1819), entitled ‘The Christian Soldier’. This was followed by ‘Occasioned by the sudden death of the Reverend Thomas Taylor; after having declared, in his last Sermon, on a preceding evening, that he hoped to die as an old soldier of Jesus Christ, with his sword in his hand.’ The echo of Mr Valiant-for-Truth’s farewell in Part II of The Pilgrim's Progress is clear. Taylor was a Methodist minister who was found dead in his bed on 15 October 1816 (JJ, p. 1053). This accounts for the stress on ‘midnight’ in the hymn. The hymn is dated 1816 in The Moravian Hymn Book (1914), which...

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