Text · full lyrics
Deep are the wounds that sin has made;
Where shall the sinner find a cure?
In vain, alas, is nature’s aid,
The work exceeds all nature’s power.
Sin like a raging fever reigns,
With fatal strength in every part;
The dire contagion fills the veins,
And spreads its poison to the heart.
And can no sovereign balm be found,
And is no kind physician nigh,
To ease the pain, and heal the wound,
Ere life and hope forever fly?
There is a great Physician near;
Look up, O fainting soul, and live;
See, in His heav’nly smiles appear
Such ease as nature cannot give!
See, in the dying Savior’s blood,
Life, health, and bliss, abundant flow!
’Tis only this dear, sacred flood
Can ease thy pain, and heal thy woe.
Sin throws in vain its pointed dart,
For here a sovereign cure is found,
A cordial for the fainting heart,
A balm for every painful wound.
And can no sovereign balm be found,
And is no kind physician nigh,
To ease the pain, and heal the wound,
Ere life and hope forever fly?
There is a great Physician near;
Look up, O fainting soul, and live;
See, in His heav’nly smiles appear
Such ease as nature cannot give!
See, in the dying Savior’s blood,
Life, health, and bliss, abundant flow!
’Tis only this dear, sacred flood
Can ease thy pain, and heal thy woe.
The lyricist
Anne Steele
Steele spent her whole life in the Particular Baptist community where her father — a timber merchant — preached without pay for some sixty years; she lived barely fifteen miles from Isaac Watts. She turned down more than one marriage proposal, including one from the hymn-writer Benjamin Beddome, on the conviction that a household would crowd out her writing, and agreed to let her hymns appear in print only reluctantly, under the name Theodosia. What set her apart was a refusal to look away from suffering: where Watts had passed over the bleakest psalms, finding no Christian joy in them, Steele set them to verse — Psalm 88 and its unbroken darkness among them — and let the grief stand. "My God, My Father, Blissful Name" is one of her gentler pieces, a hymn of resignation that steadies itself, verse by verse, against pain, sickness, and whatever providence denies.