JAMES MONTGOMERY
JAMES MONTGOMERY (1771 - 1854)

James Montgomery was born at Irvine in Ayrshire, on the western coast of Scotland. He was the son of John Montgomery, the only Moravian pastor in Scotland. The Moravian Brethren was a protestant group that started in Europe years earlier. John and his wife felt God’s call to be missionaries to the island of Barbados, in the West Indies. Tearfully, they placed six year old James in a Moravian settlement at Gracehill in Central Ireland. That was to be the last time James would see them. They died within a year of each other after reaching Barbados.

Left with nothing, James was sent to be trained for the ministry at the Moravian School at Fulneck, near Leeds, England. It was here that he first started writing verse, at the age of 10. The buildings of that school still remain. At Fulneck, secular studies were banned, but James nevertheless found means of borrowing and reading a good deal of poetry and made ambitious plans to write epics of his own. He suffered periods of deep depression as a result of losing his parents at such an early age. The Moravians who were trying to care for the orphan found him to be a dreamer, who "never had a sense of the hour." Failing school at the age of 14, they "put him out to business" to a baker in Mirfield, just seven miles to the south. James left on his own and hired himself out to a store-keeper at Wath-upon-Dearne, another thirty miles to the south. Not finding much to his liking, James ran away again, wondering from place to place, trying to sell his freshly written verses. After further adventures, including an unsuccessful attempt to launch himself into a literary career in London, he moved to Sheffield in 1792 to become assistant to Joseph Gales, auctioneer, bookseller and printer of the Sheffield Register. In 1794, Gales left England to avoid political prosecution and Montgomery took the paper in hand, changing its name to the Sheffield Iris. Now owning the paper, he was able to publish his writings as he pleased.

These were times of political repression and he was twice imprisoned on charges of sedition. The first time was in 1795 for printing a poem celebrating the fall of the Bastille; the second in 1796 was for criticizing a magistrate for forcibly dispersing a political protest in Sheffield. Turning the experience to some profit, in 1797 he published a pamphlet of poems written during his captivity as “Prison Amusements”. For some time the Iris was the only newspaper in Sheffield; but beyond the ability to produce fairly creditable articles from week to week, Montgomery was devoid of the journalistic faculties which would have enabled him to take advantage of his position. Other newspapers arose to fill the place that his might have occupied and in 1825 he sold it to a local bookseller, John Blackwell.

Meanwhile Montgomery was continuing to write poetry and achieved some fame. This success brought Montgomery a commission from the printer Bowyer to write a poem on the abolition of the slave trade, to be published along with other poems on the subject in a handsome illustrated volume. The subject appealed at once to the poet because of his own touching associations with the West Indies. The four-part poem appeared in 1809 as "The West Indies". Later, he turned to attacking the lottery in "Thoughts on Wheels" (1817) and taking up the cause of the chimney sweeps' apprentices in "The Climbing Boys' Soliloquies".

Early on Christmas Eve of 1816, James, now forty-five, opened his Bible to Luke 2 and was deeply impressed by verse 13. Pondering the story of the heralding angels, he took his pen and started writing. By the end of the day, his new Christmas poem entitled “Nativity” was being read in the pages of his newspaper. Changing its name to “Good Tidings of Great Joy for All People,” it was later set to music and was first sung on Christmas day, 1821, in a Moravian Church in England. Thirteen years after his death in 1854, Henry Smart would compose the tune “Regent Square”. It wasn’t long before Montgomery’s poem and Smart’s music were merged into the song we have in our songbook. Smart, by that time, had spent so much time working in dim light that he was totally blind. He dictated the music to his daughter who wrote it down.

One of James Montgomery’s last hymns, written in 1834, was “In the Hour of Trial”, inspired by Peter’s denial in Luke 22. Over the years, the hymn has undergone considerable alteration. The last two verses originally read:

If with sore affliction thou in love chastise,
Pour thy benediction on the sacrifice.
Then upon thine alter freely offered up,
Though the flesh may falter faith shall drink the cup.

When in dust and ashes to the grave I sink
While heaven’s glory flashes o’er the shelving brink;
On thy truth relying, through that mortal strife,
Lord, receive me dying to eternal life.

He wrote and published over 400 hymns but only 100 or so survive today. The main boost to his future popularity came when the Revd. James Cotterill arrived at the parish church (now the Sheffield Cathedral) in 1817. He had compiled and published "A Selection of Psalms and Hymns Adapted to the Services of the Church of England" in 1810 but to his disappointment and concern he found that his new parishioners did not take kindly to using it. He therefore enlisted the help of James Montgomery to help him revise the collection and improved it by adding some hymns of the poet's own composition. This new edition, meeting with the approval of the Archbishop of York (and eventually of the parishioners of St Paul’s), was finally published in 1820. He was so well liked by the people of Sheffield that he was honored by a public funeral, was buried in Sheffield cemetery and a fine monument was erected at his gravesite. The monument was later moved to the grounds of the Sheffield Cathedral. This was unusual since he was protestant and the Cathedral is Church of England.

References:
Great Chriatian Hymn Writers / Smith & Carlson / 1997 / Crossway Books
A Hymn is Born / Bonner / 1959 / Broadman Press
Then Sings My Soul # 1 Morgan / 2003 / Thomas Nelson Publishers
A Treasury of Hymn Stories Wells / 1945 / Baker Books
cyberhymnal
wikipedia