There is sunshine in my soul today

There is sunshine in my soul today. Eliza E. Hewitt* (1851-1920). According to William J. Reynolds* (Companion to Baptist Hymnal [1975] (1976), p. 221, this hymn was written after a spinal injury caused by a violent boy whom she had reprimanded while she was teaching school in Philadelphia. The boy struck her with a heavy slate, and she was in a plaster cast for some months. This hymn was written after the doctor allowed her to take a walk in Fairmount Park on a warm spring day. The sunshine, and the warm spring air, and the sense of release from her painful illness, all must have seemed emblems of her religious life as well as of her physical state (cf. her hymn ‘Welcome, royal-hearted...