Take comfort, Christians, when your friends

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Take comfort, Christians, when your friends

Author: John Logan
Published in 24 hymnals

Piano/Organ
	Gather With the Saints (Familiar hymn-tu…

Choral
	To You My Eyes Are Turned

Handbells
	Alleluia, What Wondrous Love! (Eight Rep…

Representative Text

1 Take comfort, Christians, when your friends
in Jesus fall asleep;
their better being never ends;
why then dejected weep?
2 Why inconsolable, as those
to whom no hope is giv’n?
Death is the messenger of peace,
and calls the soul to heav’n.

3 As Jesus dy'd, and rose again
victorious from the dead;
so his disciples rise, and reign
with their triumphant Head.
4 The time draws nigh, when from the clouds
Christ shall with shouts descend,
and the last trumpet’s awful voice
the heavens and earth shall rend.

5 Then they who live shall changed be,
and they who sleep shall wake;
the graves shall yield their ancient charge,
and earth’s foundations shake.
6 The saints of God, from death set free,
with joy shall mount on high;
the heav’nly hosts with praises loud
shall meet them in the sky,

7 Together to their Father’s house
with joyful hearts they go;
and dwell for ever with the Lord,
beyond the reach of woe.
8 A few short years of evil past,
we reach the happy shore,
where death-divided friends at last
shall meet, to part no more.

Source: The Irish Presbyterian Hymnbook #R53a

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Author: John Logan

Logan, John, son of a farmer, born at Fala, Midlothian, 1748, and educated at Edinburgh University, in due course entering the ministry of the Church of Scotland and becoming the minister of South Leith in 1770. During the time he held this charge he delivered a course of lectures on philosophy and history with much success. While he was thus engaged, the chair of Universal History in the University became vacant; but as a candidate he was unsuccessful. A tragedy, entitled Runnamede, followed. He offered it to the manager of Covent Garden Theatre, but it was interdicted by the Lord Chamberlain "upon suspicion of having a seditious tendency." It was subsequently acted in Edinburgh. In 1775 he formed one of the Committee by whom the Translati… Go to person page >

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First Line:	Take comfort, Christians, when your friends
Author:	John Logan
Meter:	8.6.8.6
Language:	English
Copyright:	Public Domain

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Notes

Take comfort, Christians, when your friends. J. Logan. [Sorrow, but not without Hope.] First published in the Scottish Translations and Paraphrases, 1781, No. liii., in 8 stanzas of 4 lines, and based on 1 Thess. iv. 13-18. In many American collections a cento beginning with stanzas iii., "As Jesus died and rose again," is given for Easter, and is most suitable for that purpose. It is given in Hatfield's Church Hymns, N. Y., 1872, &c. We have ascribed this paraphrase to John Logan, and not to Michael Bruce.

--Excerpts from John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)

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