At Rest

Alabama Sacred Harp singer Floyd Frederick wrote the tune At Rest (# 499) in 1959. He used two stanzas from James Montgomery’s hymn “O where shall rest be found.” The third stanza of the song in The Sacred Harp, 1991 Revision was written by Frederick.

Montgomery (1771-1854) wrote the hymn for his “Anniversary Sermons” for the Red Hill Wesleyan Sunday School in Sheffield. The sermons were preached on March 15 and 16, 1818, and the hymn was printed for use with the sermons. The original presentation was in six 4-line stanzas in short meter. The hymn was printed the next year in Thomas Cotterill’s A Selection of Psalms and Hymns for Public Worship. Cotterill changed the presentation to three 8-line stanzas. In the 1822 3rd edition of Cotterill’s Selection, it is Hymn 74. The hymn has been given various titles by hymnbook editors, such as “Life and Death—Time and Eternity,” “The Horrors of the Second Death,” and “The Present and the Future.”

1. O where shall rest be found,
Rest for the weary soul?
’Twere vain the ocean’s depths to sound,
Or pierce to either pole.

2. The world can never give
The bliss for which we sigh;
’Tis not the whole of life to live,
Nor all of death to die.

3. Beyond this vale of tears,
There is a life above,
Unmeasured by the flight of years,
And all that life is love.

4. There is a death, whose pang
Outlasts the fleeting breath:—
O what eternal horrors hang
Around the second death!

5. Lord God of truth and grace,
Teach us that death to shun;—
Nor let us from our earliest youth [Cott.: Lest we be banished from thy face,]
For ever be undone. [Cott.: And evermore undone.]

6. Here would we end our quest:—
Alone are found in Thee,
The life of perfect love,—the rest
Of immortality.

Of some of  the sad past experiences of his life, Montgomery wrote:

My restless and imaginative mind and my wild and ungovernable imagination have long ago broken loose from the anchor of faith, and have been driven, the sport of winds and waves, over an ocean of doubts, round which every coast is defended by the rocks of despair that forbid me to enter the harbor in view.

James Montgomery was born in Irvine, Ayrshire, Scotland November 4, 1771, the son of a Moravian minister. He was a prolific writer, with some 400 psalms and hymns to his credit. He was editor of the Sheffield Iris for 31 years. Montgomery died in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England April 30, 1854, and was buried in the Sheffield General Cemetery.

Floyd Monroe Frederick was the son of John T. Frederick and Asenath Wood, born April 12, 1893 in Marion County, Alabama. He married Sarah Alice Mullins. Floyd Frederick died October 9, 1960. He and Sarah Alice are buried in the Mountain Home Cemetery at Bear Creek, Marion County, Alabama.

According to The Makers of The Sacred Harp, Floyd Frederick was a music student of “Uncle Tom” Denson, going on to become a singing school teacher and composer himself. He is also author of the tune Supplication on page 539 of The Sacred Harp, 1991 Revision. Frederick also submitted songs to O. A. Parris revision of The Christian Harmony. “In 1960, while leading Anthem on the Saviour at a Sacred Harp singing at the Itawamba County courthouse in Fulton, Mississippi, he collapsed suddenly; he never regained consciousness, and died the following day at the hospital in Hamilton, Alabama” (Makers, p. 116).

As printed in 1960, At Rest contained only the two stanzas by Montgomery. In 1991, the revision committee added words written by Frederick as a third stanza:

3. Farewell, dear friends, farewell,
For just a little while;
We’ll meet and sing on Heaven’s shore,
Where parting comes no more.

The (Haleyville) Advertiser, October 11, 1960, p. 8