Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing

Robert Robinson (1735–1790) lost his father as a young boy and grew up poor in Norfolk, England. At fourteen he was sent to London as a barber's apprentice, where he spent more time reading books than cutting hair — and fell in with a rowdy crowd.

On May 24, 1752, Robinson and his friends got a fortune-teller drunk to mock her predictions, then wandered to hear the famous preacher George Whitefield — planning, by his own admission, to laugh at the preacher and pity the crowd. Instead, Whitefield's sermon on 'fleeing from the wrath to come' stopped the seventeen-year-old cold. 'Those words sunk into my heart like lead in the water,' Robinson later recalled. 'I wept, and for weeks I could think of little else.'

The wrestle lasted more than three years. Then, on December 10, 1755, Robinson wrote that he finally 'found full and free forgiveness through the precious blood of Jesus Christ.' The mocker became a minister.

Robinson wrote 'Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing' in 1758, when he was just twenty-two — according to tradition, for a Pentecost service, which would explain the line about 'flaming tongues above.' Remarkably, the very first printing has been lost; no copy survives. We know the hymn is his because of a note in Robinson's own handwriting, listing it among his works.

The hymn's most beloved line — 'prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love' — was honest autobiography. Robinson wrestled with doubt for much of his later life, and a famous story (told since the 1800s, though impossible to verify) says an elderly Robinson once met a woman in a stagecoach who was humming his hymn. 'Madam,' he reportedly said, 'I am the poor unhappy man who wrote that hymn many years ago, and I would give a thousand worlds, if I had them, to enjoy the feelings I had then.'

True or not, the story endures because the hymn itself makes room for wanderers. It is a prayer for people who know exactly how easy it is to drift.

The hymn's most puzzling line — 'Here I raise my Ebenezer' — comes from 1 Samuel 7:12. After the Lord delivered Israel in battle, the prophet Samuel set up a stone and named it Ebenezer, meaning 'stone of help,' saying, 'Hitherto hath the Lord helped us.'

To raise your own Ebenezer, then, is to build a personal monument of gratitude — to stop and mark the moment, so you never forget that God has helped you this far. Some hymnals have swapped the old word out, but the new Latter-day Saint hymnal keeps it, obscure and wonderful.

Robinson never heard the tune we sing. The melody first appeared in print in 1813, in a Pennsylvania tunebook called Wyeth's Repository of Sacred Music, Part Second, under the name HALLELUJAH. Its composer is unknown — it is simply an American folk melody that singers on the frontier passed along until someone finally wrote it down.

By 1852 the tune had picked up the name NETTLETON, honoring the evangelist Asahel Nettleton — who, as far as anyone can tell, never composed a note of music in his life. The name stuck anyway, one more happy accident in a hymn full of them.

Latter-day Saints have sung these words from the beginning — Emma Smith included the text in her 1841 Nauvoo hymnbook. It entered the official hymnal paired with NETTLETON in 1948, but in 1985 it was dropped: members, the committee felt, simply weren't singing it very often.

Then in 1994, Mack Wilberg's soaring arrangement premiered at a BYU Thanksgiving concert. It became a signature of the Tabernacle Choir, and a hymn once considered forgettable became the one members missed most. When the Church surveyed members about what the new hymnbook should include, Primary General President Susan H. Porter said 'Come, Thou Fount' was the most-requested song of all.

So on May 30, 2024, it came back — not just included, but placed first: hymn #1001, the opening hymn of Hymns—For Home and Church. The wanderer's hymn had come home to lead the whole collection.