The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Missionary Century
Philip Bliss
1838–1876 · American
A lumber-camp boy who wrote both the words and the tunes of hymns the world still sings, and died at thirty-eight going back into a burning train for his wife.
The life
Philip Paul Bliss was born in a Pennsylvania log cabin and worked in lumber camps and sawmills from the age of eleven. He heard a piano for the first time at ten and, by the family's account, wept. He taught himself music at singing schools, was discovered by D. L. Moody in Chicago, and gave up a comfortable salary to write and sing for evangelistic meetings. Unusually, he wrote both the words and the music for most of what he produced, and several of those hymns have never left the hymnals.
On 29 December 1876 the train carrying him and his wife Lucy to Chicago fell through a collapsing bridge at Ashtabula, Ohio, and burned. Bliss got clear of the wreck and went back into the fire for Lucy; neither body was ever identified. He was thirty-eight. Their trunk reached Chicago safely, and inside it was the text of his last hymn, 'I Will Sing of My Redeemer'.