John Johns

Johns, John, born at Plymouth, March 17, 1801, the son of an artist. Educated at the grammar school and by the Rev. I. Worsley, Unitarian minister at Plymouth, and afterwards spent two years at Edinburgh. In 1820 became minister of the old Presbyterian chapel at Crediton, where he remained till his removal to Liverpool in 1836, as Minister to the Poor. He was a man of fine poetic temperament and retiring disposition, but his work among the people called out his great practical and organising ability. He died a sacrifice to the fever which raged in the district where he laboured, June 23, 1847. Besides his reports to the Liverpool Domestic Mission Society, and frequent contributions to the Monthly Repository, Christian Reformer, and Christian Teacher, he published three volumes of poetry, Dews of Castalie; a collection of Poems, 1828; The Valley of the Nymphs, 1829; and Georgics of Life, 1846. There are 35 of his hymns in Dr. Beard's Collection, 1837, and several of them are in other Unitarian books. The best known of his hymns are:—
1. Come, Kingdom of our God. Prayer for the Kingdom of God.
2. Farewell, our blighted treasure. Death of a Child.
3. Great God, avert from us the thought. Heaven.
4. Hush the loud cannon's roar. Common Brother' hood and Peace Universal.
5. O know ye not that ye. Purity. This is altered from “What, know ye not that ye?"
6. Thanks to God for these who came. Preachers of the Word. Altered from "Welcome, welcome these who came."
7. Thou must be born again. Necessity of the New Birth.
These hymns were contributed to Beard's Collection, 1837, and passed thence into other collections. (Rev. Valentine D. Davis, B.A.]

--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)