ey.

What a rich legacy was bequeathed to the Christian Church by the man who
wrote "Hail to the Lord's Anointed," "Prayer is the soul's sincere
desire," "Angels, from the realms of glory," "In the hour of trial," "Who
are these in bright array?" "According to Thy gracious Word," "Come to
Calvary's holy mountain," "Forever with the Lord," "The Lord is my
shepherd, no want shall I know," "Jerusalem, my happy home," and "Go to
dark Gethsemane!" Montgomery wrote about four hundred hymns in all, and
nearly one-fourth of these are still in common use.

Montgomery began writing hymns as a little boy. He was born at Irvine,
Ayrshire, Scotland, November 4, 1771. His father was a Moravian minister,
and it had been determined that the son James should also be trained for
the same calling. Accordingly he was sent to the Moravian seminary at
Fulneck, Yorkshire, England. The parents, however, were sent to the West
Indies as missionaries, and their death there made it necessary for James
to discontinue his schooling.

For a while he worked as a clerk in a store, but this was entirely
distasteful to one who possessed the literary gifts of Montgomery. At the
age of nineteen we find him in London with a few of his poems in
manuscript form, trying to find a publisher who would print them. In this
he was unsuccessful, and two years later we follow him to Sheffield,
where he became associated with Robert Gales, editor of the Sheffield
Register.

Gales was a radical, and, because he displeased the authorities by some
of his articles, he found it convenient in 1794 to leave England for
America. Montgomery, then only twenty-three years old, took over the
publication of the paper and changed its name to the Sheffield Iris.
Montgomery, however, proved as indiscreet as Gales had been, and during
the first two years of his editorship he was twice imprisoned by the
government, the first time for publishing a poem in commemoration of "The
Fall of Bastille," and the second time for his account of a riot at
Sheffield.

In 1797 he published a volume of poems called "Prison Amusements," so
named from the fact that some of them had been written during his
imprisonment. In later years the British government granted him a pension
of $1,000 per year in recognition of his achievements and perhaps by way
of making amends for the indignity offered him by his two imprisonments.

In Montgomery's hymns we may hear for the first time the missionary note
in