"It Is Well With My Soul" was written by Horatio Gates Spafford, a Chicago lawyer and Presbyterian elder, after the French steamer Ville du Havre sank in the mid-Atlantic on 22 November 1873 and his four daughters drowned. The tune is called VILLE DU HAVRE, after the ship, and was written by Philip P. Bliss. Text and tune first appeared together in Gospel Hymns No. 2 in 1876.
That much is not in dispute.
Almost everything else about how the hymn came to exist rests on accounts given by different people at different distances from the event: a widow, a daughter born afterwards, a professional colleague writing thirty years later. They do not agree with each other. Nobody alive can settle it, and this article does not try to.
It does two other things instead. It sets out who said what, and when, so you can weigh the accounts yourself. Then it does the thing the story has crowded out for a hundred and fifty years, which is read the hymn.
Who wrote "It Is Well With My Soul"?
Horatio Gates Spafford (1828–1888) wrote the words and Philip Paul Bliss (1838–1876) wrote the music. Spafford was a Chicago attorney and an elder at Fullerton Avenue Presbyterian Church; the firm's business card at the Library of Congress, dated around 1875, gives Spafford, McDaid & Wilson at Room 37, Republic Life Building, 157 & 159 LaSalle Street.
He is not otherwise a hymn-writer of note. He published one collection of poems in 1878. This is the only text of his that survived into general use, and it is now in 598 hymnals in Hymnary's count, in English, Korean, Russian, Spanish and other languages. It is also, by that measure, one of the handful of worship songs congregations have simply refused to stop singing.
What happened to the Spafford family?
The four Spafford daughters (Annie, Maggie, Bessie and Tanetta) drowned when the Ville du Havre was struck by the iron clipper Loch Earn in the mid-Atlantic on 22 November 1873 and sank in about twelve minutes. Their mother Anna survived. Two years earlier the Great Chicago Fire had destroyed property Spafford had invested in, and eight years later the family left for Jerusalem. Here is what can be dated from documents rather than recollection.
| When | What | Where it is recorded |
|---|---|---|
| 8–10 Oct 1871 | The Great Chicago Fire destroys Chicago real estate Spafford and a group of fellow investors had bought earlier that year | Library of Congress, American Colony collection; Hymnology Archive |
| 22 Nov 1873 | Ville du Havre collides with the iron clipper Loch Earn at 47°21′N 35°31′W and sinks in about twelve minutes | Board of Trade inquiry, as summarised on Wikipedia |
| 22 Nov 1873 | 226 of the 313 aboard die and 87 survive on the inquiry figures; the Library of Congress timeline says about 232 died. Anna Spafford is among the survivors; the four daughters are not | Board of Trade inquiry via Wikipedia; Library of Congress timeline |
| 1 Dec 1873 | Survivors, transferred to the cargo ship Tremountain, land at Cardiff | Board of Trade inquiry, as summarised on Wikipedia |
| 2 Dec 1873, 5.40 a.m. | Anna's telegram is received at Spafford's Chicago office | Library of Congress, item mamcol000006 |
| 1876 | Text and tune published in Gospel Hymns No. 2 | Hymnary; Hymnology Archive |
| 29 Dec 1876 | Bliss dies in the Ashtabula bridge collapse in Ohio | Contemporary reports; Whittle's 1877 memoir |
| 16 Nov 1876 – 11 Feb 1880 | Horatio Jr is born and dies; some sources date the birth a year earlier | Library of Congress timeline; genealogical records |
| Aug 1881 | The Spaffords sail for Jerusalem with a small group and found the American Colony | Library of Congress; Hymnology Archive |
The girls' exact ages at the sinking are given differently by different sources: Wikipedia and most popular retellings give 12, 7, 5 and 2, while Hymnology Archive, working from the birthdates, gives 11, 9, 5 and 2. That is a small thing, and it is a fair warning about the rest.
The telegram
The Library of Congress holds it. Popular retellings quote it as two words, "Saved alone". The document itself reads:
Saved alone what shall I do. Mrs [Daniel] Goodwin [friend] Children [Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and Tanetta Spafford] Willie Culver [neighbor boy] lost go with [Rev.] Lorriaux [French minister, a fellow survivor of shipwreck] until answer reply . . . Paris. [Anna] Spafford.
The square brackets and the ellipsis belong to the Library of Congress archivists, not to Anna; the telegram itself has no punctuation between the names. Mrs Daniel Goodwin was a family friend travelling with them, Willie Culver a neighbour's boy, and Lorriaux a French minister in the party who survived.
Four words of that telegram are usually dropped, and they are the four that change it. What shall I do is not a statement of faith. It is a question from a woman who has been in the water and has just landed in Wales.
Did Spafford write the hymn on the ship?
Probably not, and the version everybody repeats has the least support of the three on record. Anna Spafford said her husband wrote it in Chicago straight after the news came. Their daughter Bertha said he wrote it at sea, on the crossing to meet her, but Bertha was born five years after the sinking. Ira Sankey, who compiled the hymnbook it first appeared in and was staying in the Spaffords' house at the time, dated the writing to 1876, three years later.
Anna Spafford, his widow, put it straight after the news came. Her words, given to Margueritte Bixler Garrett and William Beery before her death in 1923: "My husband at that time, just after receiving the terrible news of the loss of his children, wrote the hymn, 'It is well with my soul.'"
Bertha Spafford Vester, their daughter, said her father wrote it "over the ocean", on the crossing to meet Anna. Bertha was born in 1878, five years after the sinking, so she is repeating what she was told.
Ira D. Sankey, who compiled Gospel Hymns with Bliss and had every professional reason to know, dated it three years later. In My Life and the Story of the Gospel Hymns (1906): "In 1876, when we returned to Chicago to work, I was entertained at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Spafford for a number of weeks. During that time Mr. Spafford wrote the hymn 'It is well with my soul' in commemoration of the death of his children." Sankey was in the house. He adds that Bliss then wrote the tune and sang it first at a meeting in Farwell Hall.
The manuscript does not settle it. Hymnology Archive reports that the copy held at the Library of Congress is written on Brevoort House stationery, a Chicago hotel on Madison Street, and that it carries no date. Its reverse has two further stanzas in pencil, drafts towards what became the fourth verse, including lines that never made it: "Now Lord, make it Thee for thy servant to live, / If I die, when the summons shall toll..." The first stanza's third line originally read "thou hast taught me to know"; Spafford later changed it to "say", which rhymes with "way" at the end of the first line.
So: an undated manuscript on Chicago hotel paper, and three accounts: one placing the writing immediately after the news came, one placing it somewhere on the Atlantic, one placing it in Chicago in 1876. Anna does not name a city. Bertha does not name a year. Only Sankey dates it. I have no way to choose between them and neither does anyone else.
The captain, and the spot where the ship went down
The most cinematic detail in the whole story is the captain calling Spafford to the bridge to tell him they were passing over the place where the Ville du Havre sank.
It is worth noticing where that detail is and is not. The 2016 Leben magazine account by Kate Uttinger, which draws on Jane Fletcher Geniesse's biography American Priestess (Doubleday, 2008), gets as far as the captain's reckoning ("by the captain's estimate, they were now sailing over the place where the Ville de Havre went down"), and no further. The summons to the bridge is not in it. It is not in the Library of Congress essay on the sinking either, and it is not in Hymnology Archive's account. What Hymnology Archive does report is a letter Spafford wrote to his sister mentioning that he passed "over the spot where she went down."
That is the whole of the evidence I could reach: a letter saying he crossed the place, a captain's estimate of where the place was, and a scene I could not trace to any source at all.
The financial story
The usual version says the Chicago Fire ruined him, and that this is why he stayed behind while his family sailed.
The documented core is that the 1871 fire destroyed Chicago real estate he and a group of fellow investors had bought earlier that year, and that he was still in debt in November 1873. Geniesse's biography, as reported by Leben, goes considerably further: heavily mortgaged deals collapsing, money drawn from a niece's and a nephew's accounts, railroad losses in inflated currency, and a debt of roughly $100,000 by the time the family left for Jerusalem.
That last figure is worth handling carefully, because it describes 1881, not 1873. Running it together with the fire produces a tidy sentence (he lost everything, so he sent his family ahead) that the dates do not actually support. Something was wrong with his finances in 1873. How wrong, on that particular day, I could not establish from any source I could reach.
Why he stayed behind is given at three levels of confidence. Most accounts say a business matter. Hymnology Archive is more specific: a prospective buyer had contacted him about the fire-damaged properties, so he stayed to see the sale through, and asked Pastor Lorriaux to travel with his family. Geniesse's account, at the far end, has the buyer dying just before the family sailed, with Spafford not telling Anna. That last detail I have not seen supported by a letter or a contemporary record, and I would not repeat it as fact.
What happened afterwards
Their son Horatio was born on 16 November 1876 (that is the Library of Congress timeline's date; Wikipedia puts the birth a year earlier, in 1875), and died on 11 February 1880. On the Library of Congress dates he was three; on Wikipedia's he was four, which is the age nearly every account gives. Scarlet fever is the cause given in almost all of them.
The Spaffords left Fullerton Avenue Presbyterian Church and formed an independent group, which they called "the Bride". Angus Stewart's account has "the Overcomers" as a name applied by opponents; the Library of Congress timeline uses it plainly. In August 1881 they sailed for Jerusalem with a small party and founded what became the American Colony.
What happened inside that community is disputed by named people in print, and the disagreement is not a small one.
Jane Fletcher Geniesse, in American Priestess (2008), gives an account that later writers have used to describe the Colony as a controlling religious group: a celibacy rule, a member refused medical care, enforced isolation, children separated from parents. The contemporary critic at the centre of the record is Selah Merrill, the United States consul in Jerusalem and a former Presbyterian chaplain, who publicised complaints against the group.
Bertha Spafford Vester, in her memoir Our Jerusalem (Hymnology Archive dates it 1951; other listings give 1950), had already characterised much of this as rumour and slander originating with that same consul, whom she describes as putting words into members' mouths and distorting what they believed.
Two later writers read the same material in opposite directions. Angus Stewart, writing for the Covenant Protestant Reformed Church, argues that Spafford ended as a fraudulent cult leader, resting almost entirely on Geniesse. Kenneth Berding of Biola University, writing on 3 August 2020, argues that whatever came later, Spafford's theology at the time the hymn was written was orthodox.
I have read neither Geniesse nor Vester in full, both being beyond reach for this article, and I am not going to adjudicate between a biographer working partly from consular records and a daughter defending her parents. What I will say is that this is a genuine dispute between named sources with dates on them, and that anyone who tells you it is settled has read one side.
One thing is not in dispute. On Christmas Eve 1925, Bertha Spafford Vester took in a Bedouin infant whose mother had died. That baby home became what is now the Spafford Children's Center, working in the Old City of Jerusalem, treating children irrespective of religion or background. It has been running for a hundred years.
And Bliss
Philip Bliss and his wife Lucy were on the Pacific Express on 29 December 1876 when the bridge over the Ashtabula River in Ohio collapsed. The carriages fell into the ravine and burned. Around 92 of the 159 aboard died. Neither Bliss nor Lucy was ever identified among the remains.
The story told about him afterwards was that he escaped the wreck and went back into the fire for his wife. That account came from one man, J. E. Burchell. D. W. Whittle, compiling his memoir of Bliss the following year, reported that Burchell's version was conjecture: Whittle showed Bliss's photograph to surviving passengers and none of them could place him getting out. Which does not establish that Bliss stayed in the carriage. Only that nobody saw him leave it.
So the same thing happened twice, to two men who made one hymn: a true and terrible event, and then a better story growing over it. Which is why it is worth turning, finally, to the words.
What does "It is well with my soul" mean?
Three of the four stanzas are not about the shipwreck at all. One turns on circumstance, and even there the sea is a simile; no ship appears anywhere in the hymn. The others are about Satan's buffeting from 2 Corinthians 12, sin cancelled at the cross from Colossians 2, and the return of Christ from 1 Thessalonians 4. The refrain says nothing about grief. It says the singer's soul is at peace, on the ground given in stanza three.
Here is the text as it is most commonly printed. Hymnals vary (some have "hath regarded", others "has"), which is what you would expect of a text in 598 books.
When peace like a river attendeth my way, When sorrows like sea billows roll; Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say, It is well, it is well with my soul.
Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come, Let this blest assurance control, That Christ hath regarded my helpless estate, And hath shed his own blood for my soul.
My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought! My sin, not in part but the whole, Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more, Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!
And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight, The clouds be rolled back as a scroll; The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend, Even so, it is well with my soul.
The refrain (It is well with my soul, it is well, it is well with my soul) is sung after every stanza in most congregations, though Hymnary's edition marks it as optional except after the last.
"Peace like a river" · Isaiah 66:12
The image is not Spafford's. It is Isaiah's, at the very end of the book:
For this is what the LORD says: 'I will extend peace to her like a river, and the wealth of nations like a flooding stream; you will feed and be carried on her arm and dandled on her knees. As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you, and you will be comforted over Jerusalem.'
Isaiah 66:12–13, NIVUK
The King James, the standard English Bible in American Presbyterian churches in the 1870s, has "the glory of the Gentiles like a flowing stream" where the NIVUK has "the wealth of nations like a flooding stream". Either way the river is the peace, not the trouble.
And here is the part that is worth the detour. The Hebrew word Isaiah uses for "peace" is שָׁלוֹם, shalom, Strong's 7965.
Now turn to 2 Kings 4. A woman from Shunem has had her son carried in from the harvest field with a headache; he sits on her knees until noon and dies there. She carries him upstairs, lays him on the bed in the prophet's room, shuts the door, and asks her husband for a servant and a donkey. He asks why she is going today, and she answers with one word, which the King James renders "It shall be well". She rides to Mount Carmel. Elisha sees her coming and sends his servant out to meet her:
Run now, I pray thee, to meet her, and say unto her, Is it well with thee? is it well with thy husband? is it well with the child? And she answered, It is well.
2 Kings 4:26, KJV
Four times in that verse the English says well. Four times the Hebrew says shalom: the same word, Strong's 7965, that Isaiah calls a river.
I want to be careful about what that does and does not prove. Hymnology Archive's analysis of the hymn lists Isaiah 66:12, 2 Corinthians 12:7, Colossians 2:14, 1 Thessalonians 4:16 and passages in Revelation. It does not list 2 Kings 4:26. No source I could find shows Spafford, or anyone writing in his lifetime, claiming that connection. It appears widely in sermons and devotional writing, and as far as I can establish it is a reading made afterwards.
What is not a reading is the Hebrew. Under the two English phrases, "it is well" in 2 Kings and "peace" in Isaiah, lies one word. Whether Spafford knew that, I cannot tell you. That it is so, you can check in about ninety seconds.
And it changes what the woman in 2 Kings is doing. She is not saying her son is fine. He is dead in the room upstairs, and she put him there. She says shalom to her husband before she leaves and shalom to Gehazi when she arrives, and then she gets to Elisha and takes hold of his feet and says the thing she actually means. That is a good deal closer to what a bereaved person sounds like than the serene version usually preached.
"Sorrows like sea billows roll"
This one is not a quotation of anything, and I will not pretend otherwise. The nearest biblical image is:
Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.
Psalm 42:7, NIVUK
That is my reading, not a documented source, and you should treat it as such. What is worth noting is the grammar of the stanza rather than the imagery: when peace, when sorrows, whatever my lot. The line is built to cover both conditions with the same answer. It was never a claim that things were fine.
"Though Satan should buffet" · 2 Corinthians 12:7
"Buffet" is a strange word to find in a hymn, and it is there because it was in Spafford's Bible. The King James of 2 Corinthians 12:7 has "the messenger of Satan to buffet me". Modern translations have dropped it:
…Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me.
2 Corinthians 12:7b, NIVUK
Hymnology Archive names this verse in its analysis, and the borrowing is about as clear as these things get. Which means the second stanza is not describing a shipwreck. It is describing Paul's thorn: something ongoing, unremoved, prayed about three times and not taken away, with the answer given in the next verses: my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.
"My sin, not in part but the whole" · Colossians 2:14
This is the stanza the hymn stands on, and it is the one nobody quotes on a photograph of the sea.
When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.
Colossians 2:13–14, NIVUK
Read those two verses next to the stanza and the correspondence is line for line. Dead in your sins becomes "my helpless estate". All our sins becomes "not in part but the whole". Nailing it to the cross becomes "is nailed to the cross". He has taken it away becomes "and I bear it no more".
The word behind "the charge of our legal indebtedness" is a debt certificate: a document recording what is owed. Paul's claim is not that the debt was forgiven in feeling. It is that the document was cancelled and taken out of the way, nailed up, in the same verb the Gospels use of the man on the cross. A verse later he adds the word "public".
Whatever Horatio Spafford's circumstances were in 1873 (and we have just spent two thousand words establishing how little we can pin down about them) this stanza is not a report on them. It is a citation.
"The trump shall resound" · 1 Thessalonians 4:16
For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.
1 Thessalonians 4:16, NIVUK
Paul says the same thing to Corinth with the same trumpet:
Listen, I tell you a mystery: we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed – in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.
1 Corinthians 15:51–52, NIVUK
"The clouds be rolled back as a scroll" takes its sky from Isaiah 34:4 and Revelation 6:14, where the heavens are rolled up like a scroll; though that identification is mine, not a sourced one. Hymnology Archive's own list points elsewhere in Revelation: chapter 19 for the descent, and 1:7 and 22:20 for the "even so" of the last line.
And notice who is in that verse. The dead in Christ will rise first. A man who has buried four daughters, singing a stanza about the dead rising before anyone else moves, is not making a general point about the end of the world. But the stanza does not say so, and does not need the biography to work. It quotes Paul and stops.
Is "It Is Well" by Bethel the same song?
No. Bethel Music's "It Is Well", sung by Kristene DiMarco, is a new song written by DiMarco in 2014 that quotes lines from Spafford's 1876 hymn, with Spafford and Bliss credited for the quotation. The two get merged in playlists and in people's heads, and they are doing different jobs.
It was recorded on the 2014 album You Make Me Brave: Live at the Civic and released as a single in March 2015. It reached number 27 on Billboard's Hot Christian Songs chart, spent twenty-two non-consecutive weeks on it, and is certified platinum.
Brian Hehn, director of the Center for Congregational Song, published a side-by-side comparison of the two texts on 3 March 2023. His reading is that Spafford's moves through trial, the cross and Christ's return, with the weight resting on what Christ has already done, while DiMarco's is a statement of God's power followed by a repeated refrain in which the singer holds on. He is explicit that one should not replace the other, and suggests DiMarco's early in a service and Spafford's as a sending song. Pressed to choose, he prefers Spafford's, for what he calls its consistent focus on Christ.
I would rather report that than pretend to referee it. A church that sings both is not confused.
Which brings me to one of mine
I write worship songs, so I am not a neutral party in an argument about whether the story behind a song matters. I would rather say where I stand and show my working. I have made the same admission about a different hymn, and it cut against me there too.
Found came out on 10 February 2023. Jake Isaac produced it. It runs three minutes fifty at sixty-two beats a minute, mostly piano, with a saxophone line that arrives late. It is not a famous song and I am not going to dress it up as one. It was written for a body of work called The Prodigals.
It opens with a refusal:
I will not monetise you I will not trade you for gold I will not trivialise you I know where the power is
The press release we sent out in January 2023 named two scriptures behind it: Jeremiah 29:13 and 1 John 4:10. It also printed the second one as "John 4:10", which is a different book and the wrong verse, and nobody caught it for nearly four years. I mention it because this whole article is about how easily a reference drifts once it is repeated, and it would be poor form to make that case about Victorian anthologies and quietly skip my own press release.
Jeremiah 29:13, in the place it actually sits
The verse is this:
You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.
Jeremiah 29:13, NIVUK
It sits two verses below the one on the mugs, and both of them are inside a letter. Jeremiah writes it to people who have been deported to Babylon, whose city is gone, and the first thing he tells them is that they are not coming home:
This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: 'Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters... Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.'
Jeremiah 29:4–7, NIVUK
Then the seventy years, and the promise:
This is what the LORD says: 'When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfil my good promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you,' declares the LORD, 'plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
Jeremiah 29:10–11, NIVUK
Seventy years is a life. Most of the people reading that letter were being told, in the kindest possible terms, that they would die in Babylon. And it is to those people, in that paragraph, that the plans and the finding are addressed. The promise of finding is not made to people whose situation is about to improve. It is made to people planting gardens in a country they were dragged to.
It is also not new. Moses says it first, in almost the same words, and Jeremiah's readers would have known it:
But if from there you seek the LORD your God, you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and with all your soul.
Deuteronomy 4:29, NIVUK
From there. Not from home. From wherever the trouble has put you.
That is the same structure as the first stanza of Spafford's hymn, whatever my lot, and it is why I think the two songs belong in the same conversation even though one of them is in 598 hymnals and the other is a small record on the internet.
The other half of Found is Luke 15
The chorus is a set of past tenses:
I found love when I found You Found peace in the storm Found hope when You found me Found what I was looking for
And later, the line the whole song turns on:
You came running for me My Champion came for me
That is not a metaphor I invented. It is the father in the parable, and Jesus puts the running in deliberately:
'But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms round him and kissed him.
Luke 15:20, NIVUK
'For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.' So they began to celebrate.
Luke 15:24, NIVUK
The word is right there in the text, twice, and it is the reason the record is called The Prodigals and the song is called Found. Luke 15 gives the same verdict three times in one chapter, over a sheep, a coin and a son, and each time the finding is done by somebody else. The sheep does not navigate home. The coin does nothing at all.
Which is why the chorus is worded the way it is: found hope when You found me. Both halves, in that order.
The story under Found
There is a tidy version of this section I nearly wrote, in which "It Is Well With My Soul" is the song with the great story that cannot be verified, and Found is the song with no story at all, standing on its text alone.
That would have been false. Found has a story, and it is on this site. The second video, filmed five months after the lyric video, acted by other people, with me singing in the gaps, is that story rather than a printing of the words. It opens on a baby and a single father, a man raising a son by himself. My father decided early that I should make my own way, and I did: as a teenager I slept out, and slept rough, moving between friends and neighbours, because it was easier than being at home. I danced through it, in secret, where nobody could see, because dancing was the thing that made the rest of it bearable.
None of that is what the film is about. It is about what kept finding me in it. Every phase gets a scene and grace is in all of them, which is the reversal the whole song runs on: the searching in Found is God's, not mine. That is why the chorus is worded found hope when You found me and not the other way round, and it is why the last thing on the screen is a typewriter with two words on it, TO BE CONTINUED, under this:
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.
James 1:17, KJV
No variableness, neither shadow of turning. No wobble in him, no change in the light as the day moves. Which is the claim I would actually make for Found: not that it came out of somewhere hard, though parts of it did, but that the giver was the same through the hard part and the rest of it.
Found is free, like everything else here. So is the whole catalogue, take any of it, and take it to a service or a car or a kitchen if it is any use to you. No email, no account.
Not every story is a tragedy, and the ones that are travel further
This next bit is true and I do not much enjoy writing it down.
Songs that come out of the dark path get more attention than songs that come out of an ordinary good day. Everyone who writes them knows this. "It Is Well With My Soul" is the far end of it: four drowned daughters, and a text that outlived everything else its author wrote and now sits in 598 hymnals. Some of that is the third stanza, which is very good. Some of it, honestly, is the Ville du Havre.
I do not think that is cynicism on anyone's part. It is what people are for. Somebody reaching for a song at two in the morning is not reaching for a song about a good week. They want one that has been where they are, and a writer who has been there carries a credential that nothing else supplies. That is a real need, and the church has always met it: on Glenn Pemberton's count, around 40% of the Psalms are lament.
But it produces a distortion worth naming. A song out of grief gets a hearing it has not yet earned. A song out of gratitude has to earn one from a standing start. And the ordering that results (darker story, more weight) ranks the writers' circumstances rather than what the songs say about God.
God is good in both. That is the flat statement I want to make, and it is not a sentimental one: it is the thing James 1:17 is for. If the giver does not vary, then the song written in the wreckage and the song written on a good Tuesday are reporting on the same person, and only one of them will get played on the hard night.
So does the story matter, or the feeling?
Both, and neither is the ground.
The story matters. It is how anyone finds the hymn in the first place. Four girls drowned in twelve minutes in the middle of the Atlantic, and a woman sent a telegram with four words in it that nobody quotes. That is true, it is unbearable, and knowing it changes what a congregation hears when the second line arrives. A text that came out of somewhere real is not the same as a text assembled at a desk, and pretending otherwise is dishonest about how people work. Grief buys a hearing that argument cannot.
The feeling matters too. Most people who love this hymn have never read a word about Spafford. They love it because of what Bliss did with the melody: the bass moving against the tune, the long climb of the last line, the way the refrain lands lower than you expect and settles. A congregation is not running footnotes at half past ten on a Sunday morning. They are singing, and something in them goes quiet. That is not a lesser response. It is most of what music is for.
Neither one ranks the songs, either. A story does not make a text true, and the absence of a tragedy does not make one shallow. Spafford's is the more famous circumstance by a distance. Whether it is the more instructive one is a different question, and the answer does not follow from the size of the loss.
And neither one holds the weight. The story is contested at nearly every joint: three accounts of the writing, an undated manuscript, a captain who appears in the retellings and not in the letter, a biography and a memoir that describe the same community as a cult and as a slandered family. And the feeling moves. It is there in the third verse on a good Sunday and gone in a hospital corridor on a Tuesday.
What does not move is the sentence in the third stanza, and it is not Spafford's sentence. He was quoting:
He forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.
Colossians 2:13–14, NIVUK
This is the whole hinge. Whether it was well with Horatio Spafford's soul in November 1873 is between him and God, and the historical record, as this article has laboured to show, will not tell us. Whether the record of what stood against him was cancelled at the cross is not a question about Spafford at all. It is a question about whether Colossians 2:14 is true.
I hold that it is. Not because a bereaved man in Chicago wrote a good line about it, and not because the tune is beautiful, though it is. Because the Bible says the certificate of debt was nailed up and taken away, and I have staked everything I have on the Bible being right about that.
Which means the hymn survives the loss of its own story. Strip out the ship, the telegram, the captain, the Colony, every contested paragraph above, and stanza three still says what Paul said, and it is still either true or it is not, and the singer's circumstances do not get a vote.
That is why "it is well with my soul" is bearable to sing on a day when nothing is well. It was never a report on the weather. It is shalom said out loud twice (once to a husband who does not yet know, and once at Carmel at the end of the ride) with the boy still dead upstairs, by someone who has decided where to look.
But if from there you seek the LORD your God, you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and with all your soul.
Deuteronomy 4:29, NIVUK
From there. Not from somewhere better.
Scripture quotations marked NIVUK taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version Anglicised, Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 Biblica. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton Publishers, an Hachette UK company. All rights reserved. 'NIV' is a registered trademark of Biblica. UK trademark number 1448790. Quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version, which is in the public domain in most of the world; in the United Kingdom the rights are vested in the Crown.
Sources
- It is well with my soul · Hymnology Archive · the manuscript description, the conflicting composition accounts, and the scripture allusions in its analysis
- When Peace, Like a River · Hymnary.org · text, tune attribution, 598 hymnals
- C. Michael Hawn, "History of Hymns: It Is Well with My Soul" · UMC Discipleship Ministries
- Library of Congress, American Colony in Jerusalem collection: the telegram, item mamcol000006; "Saved Alone"; the family tragedy exhibit; timeline 1873–1881
- Loch Earn, the Board of Trade inquiry and the casualty figures
- Kate Uttinger, "Shipwreck and the American Colony", Leben (20 December 2016) · the article's citations for the financial and Colony material are to Jane Fletcher Geniesse, American Priestess (Doubleday, 2008)
- Angus Stewart, "Horatio Spafford", Covenant Protestant Reformed Church and Kenneth Berding, Biola University Good Book Blog (3 August 2020) · the two opposed readings
- Bertha Spafford Vester, Our Jerusalem (1951), cited here at second hand; Spafford Children's Center history
- Philip Bliss and the Ashtabula disaster
- Hebrew from the Bible Hub interlinears for 2 Kings 4:26 and Isaiah 66:12 · both shalom, Strong's 7965
- It Is Well (Bethel Music and Kristene DiMarco) and the Center for Congregational Song's text comparison