Text · full lyrics
With broken heart and contrite sigh,
A trembling sinner, Lord, I cry.
Thy pard'ning grace is rich and free:
O God, be merciful to me!
I smite upon my troubled breast,
With deep and conscious guilt oppressed;
Christ and His cross my only plea:
O God, be merciful to me!
Far off I stand with tearful eyes
Nor dare uplift them to the skies,
But Thou dost all my anguish see:
O God, be merciful to me!
Nor alms nor deeds that I have done
Can for a single sin atone.
To Calvary alone I flee:
O God, be merciful to me!
And when, redeemed from sin and hell,
With all the ransomed throng I dwell,
My raptured song shall ever be:
God has been merciful to me.
The lyricist
Cornelius Elven
For fifty years Elven was the Baptist minister at Bury St. Edmunds — a single settled pastorate rather than a traveling one, the same Suffolk congregation across his entire working life. He wrote "With Broken Heart and Contrite Sigh" in January 1852 for a series of special services at that chapel; it reworks the publican's prayer from Luke 18 — "God, be merciful to me" — into five plain stanzas. The hymn spread into collections on both sides of the Atlantic, and that single text is essentially the whole of his standing as a hymnwriter.
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