What a friend we have in Jesus

What a friend we have in Jesus. Joseph Medlicott Scriven* (1819-1886). Written in Canada West during the mid-1850s by an Irish immigrant teacher, hymn writer, and Plymouth Brethren leader, Joseph Medlicott Scriven, allegedly for his mother who lived in present-day Northern Ireland. While the hymn circulated in at least three manuscripts, Scriven himself did not choose to include it in his own collections of hymns published during his lifetime. It was published in J.B. Packard’s Spirit Minstrel: A Collection of Hymns and Music (1857), and Horace L. Hastings included it as an anonymous hymn text in the first edition of his Social Hymns: Original and Selected (Boston, 1865). Charles C...