At various times Lady Huntingdon expressed her religious experience in verse, and the manful vigor of her school of faith recalls the unbending confidence of Job, for she was not a stranger to affliction.
God's furnace doth in Zion stand, But Zion's God sits by, As the refiner views his gold, With an observant eye.
His thoughts are high, His love is wise, His wounds a cure intend; And, though He does not always smile, He loves unto the end.
Her great hymn, that keeps her memory green, has the old-fashioned flavor. "Massa made God BIG!" was the comment on Dr. Bellany made by his old negro servant after that noted minister's death. In Puritan piety the sternest self-depreciation qualified every thought of the creature, while every allusion to the Creator was a magnificat. Lady Huntingdon's hymn has no flattering phrases for the human subject. "Worthless worm," and "vilest of them all" indicate the true Pauline or Oriental prostration of self before a superior being; but there is grandeur in the metre, the awful reverence, and the scene of judgment in the stanzas--always remembering the mighty choral that has so long given the lyric its voice in the church, and is ancillary to its fame:
When Thou, my righteous Judge, shalt come To take Thy ransomed people home, Shall I among them stand? Shall such a worthless worm as I, Who sometimes am afraid to die, Be found at Thy right hand?
I love to meet Thy people now, Before Thy feet with them to bow, Though vilest of them all; But can I bear the piercing thought, What if my name should be left out, When Thou for them shalt call?
O Lord, prevent it by Thy grace: Be Thou my only hiding place, In this th' accepted day; Thy pardoning voice, oh let me hear, To still my unbelieving fear, Nor let me fall, I pray.
Among Thy saints let me be found, Whene'er the archangel's trump shall sound, To see Thy smiling face; Then loudest of the throng I'll sing, While heaven's resounding arches ring With shouts of sovereign grace.
The tune of "Meribah," in which this hymn has been sung for the last sixty or more years, is one of Dr. Lowell Mason's masterpieces. An earlier German harmony attributed to Heinrich Isaac and named "Innsbruck" has in some few cases claimed association with the words, though composed two hundred years before Lady Huntingdon was born. It is strong and solemn, but its cold psalm-tune movement does not utter the deep emotion of the author's lines. "Meribah" was inspired by the hymn itself, and there is nothing invidious in saying it illustrates the fact, memorable in all hymnology, of the natural obligation of a hymn to its tune.