There Is a Green Hill Far Away

Cecil Frances Alexander (1818–1895) was an Anglo-Irish poet who wrote nearly four hundred hymns — most of them for children, and most of them before she married. In 1848 she published Hymns for Little Children, a small book with a big idea: take the hardest doctrines of the faith and teach them 'in the language of verse, which children love.'

Each hymn in the book explained a phrase of the Apostles' Creed. For 'Maker of heaven and earth' she wrote 'All Things Bright and Beautiful.' For 'born of the Virgin Mary,' 'Once in Royal David's City.' And for the phrase 'suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried,' she wrote 'There Is a Green Hill Far Away.'

The little book became one of the century's great publishing successes, reaching its sixty-ninth edition by 1900. Alexander gave the profits away — to a school for deaf children in Ireland that she supported all her life.

Alexander never saw Jerusalem. But she lived in Derry, one of Ireland's famous walled cities, and tradition holds that a small grassy hill she often passed outside those old walls became her picture of Calvary — far away in one sense, and just up the road in another.

The hymn's most puzzling line for children — 'without a city wall' — simply uses the old meaning of 'without': outside. Jesus was crucified outside Jerusalem's wall, just as Hebrews 13:12 says he 'suffered without the gate.' Generations of puzzled children have wondered why the green hill didn't have a wall; the answer is that the hill isn't missing anything — the word has just grown old.

Alexander married a clergyman, William Alexander, who eventually became the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland — and who cheerfully admitted that his wife's hymns would outlive his sermons. She spent her life visiting the sick and the poor and helping establish nursing care in Derry, and she guarded her verses fiercely, calling attempts to alter them 'literary sacrilege.'

Her green hill traveled far. The great French composer Charles Gounod wrote his own musical setting of it in 1871 and is said to have called it the most perfect hymn in the English language — praise that has followed the hymn ever since.

Here is something most members don't know: nearly all of Christianity sings this hymn to a gentle English tune called HORSLEY. Latter-day Saints sing something different — a tune called MEDITATION, by John Henry Gower (1855–1922), an English organist with an Oxford doctorate in music who emigrated to Denver in 1887, played in its cathedral, and dabbled in Colorado mining on the side.

Gower's tune pairs the verses two at a time and darkens dramatically in the middle — right where the words confess 'we may not know, we cannot tell what pains he had to bear.' That shadow in the music, absent from the placid tune the rest of the world sings, is part of why the hymn feels so tender to Latter-day Saints.

Latter-day Saints have been singing 'There Is a Green Hill Far Away' since at least 1909, when it appeared in the Deseret Sunday School Songs. Gower's tune has been the official pairing since at least the 1948 hymnal.

Today it stands as hymn #194, marked 'Reverently,' in the sacrament section of the 1985 hymnal — a song written to help children grasp the Crucifixion, now helping every generation do the same thing each Sunday: 'We may not know, we cannot tell... but we believe it was for us.'