Take My Heart and Let It Be Consecrated

Frances Ridley Havergal (1836–1879) was the daughter of an English clergyman and hymn composer, and she was extraordinary from the start: reading as a tiny child, and eventually memorizing the entire New Testament except Acts — along with the Psalms, Isaiah, and the Minor Prophets. She read her scriptures in Greek and Hebrew, sang and played the piano beautifully, and did it all in a body that was frail her whole life. She died at just forty-two.

Unusually for hymn history, the story of her most famous hymn needs no debunking. She wrote it down herself, in a letter her sister later published: 'Perhaps you will be interested to know the origin of the consecration hymn...'

In the winter of 1873–74, Havergal spent five days at Areley House in Worcestershire. Ten people were staying there — 'some unconverted and long prayed for, some converted, but not rejoicing Christians.' Her prayer was audacious: 'Lord, give me all in this house!' And, she wrote, 'He just did.' Before the visit ended, every person in the house had received the blessing she'd prayed for — the last two, the family's daughters, in tears near midnight of the final night.

Then, in her own words: 'I was too happy to sleep, and passed most of the night in praise and renewal of my own consecration; and these little couplets formed themselves and chimed in my heart one after another till they finished with Ever, only, ALL for Thee!' The manuscript is dated February 4, 1874.

Havergal didn't just write 'take my silver and my gold' — four years later, she lived it. In 1878 she packed nearly fifty pieces of jewelry, including 'a jewel cabinet that is really fit for a countess,' and shipped them to the Church Missionary Society to fund mission work. 'I had no idea I had such a jeweller's shop,' she wrote a friend. 'I don't think I need tell you I never packed a box with such pleasure.'

She spent her last year writing Kept for the Master's Use, a little book walking through her hymn's couplets one by one — a life audit against her own lyrics. She passed the audit.

The tune HENDON comes from César Malan (1787–1864), a Swiss revival preacher who wrote more than a thousand hymns and preached from a chapel he built in his own garden in Geneva. Lowell Mason — often called the father of American church music — harmonized it for American congregations in 1841.

When the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released the hymn on February 13, 2025, as #1025 in Hymns—For Home and Church, it made one gentle change right in the title: 'Take my life' became 'Take my heart.' The verses still offer hands, voice, and will — the whole self, consecrated piece by piece, exactly as Havergal offered hers.