Day Eighteen - Forty days and forty nights

Isn't it funny how sometimes half remembered words and music from songs and hymns from our past will flit through our minds? As I sat down to write this piece a few of the words of the hymn "Forty days and Forty nights" crossed my mind and having not sung that hymn for quite a number of years it came a surprise to me that it had done so! As it then became the only hymn I could hear (and realising I could, rather irritatingly, only remember some of the words!) I decided to Google it and see what I could find out.

I found the words quite easily (with a number of variations, of course) and then took a look at the writer, George Hunt Smyttan. He was born in Bombay in 1822, where his father was head of the District Medical Board. He studied at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, and was ordained in 1848. He was briefly curate of Ellington, near Alnwick, Northumberland; then rector of Hawksworth near Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire from 1850 until ill-health forced to him resign in 1859. George was known to have been married to Frances Hardy Grey of Millfield Hall in 1848 but in her family’s history it is remarked that they were not much together and they had no children.

Among his writings were “Thoughts in Verse for the Afflicted” (1849) and “Mission Songs and Ballads” (1860). “Forty Days and Forty Nights” was first published in the Penny Post religious magazine in March 1856 with the title “Poetry for Lent: As sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.” It was altered by Francis Pott and printed in his “Hymns Fitted to the Order of Common Prayer” (1861). It also features, along with 3 other of Smyttan’s hymns in the 1864 collection “Lyra Eucharistica No 390”.

George died suddenly on February 21st 1870 while travelling in German, alone and unknown there and was buried in a pauper’s grave in Frankfurt-am-Main labelled “Smyttan, England”. He was 48 when he died.

It made me think that if George hadn’t have written the hymn that I remember singing as a child, as perhaps you do too, he might not have been remembered at all. He would have been known only to God.

So if you now have “Forty days and forty nights” stuck in your head too – why not give it a sing today and as you do perhaps remember all those who over the years have no one to take their memory into the future and who are known only to God, giving thanks for their lives and that we have a God who cares for each and every one of us.

I’ve provided the words below, just in case like me, you’re a bit hazy once you get past the first verse!

Forty days and forty nights

Thou wast fasting in the wild;

Forty days and forty nights

Tempted, and yet undefiled.

Sunbeams scorching all the day;

Chilly dew-drops nightly shed;

Prowling beasts about Thy way;

Stones Thy pillow; earth Thy bed.

Should not we Thy sorrow share

And from worldly joys abstain,

Fasting with unceasing prayer,

Strong with Thee to suffer pain?

Then if Satan on us press,

Jesus, Saviour, hear our call!

Victor in the wilderness,

Grant we may not faint nor fall!

So shall we have peace divine:

Holier gladness ours shall be;

Round us, too, shall angels shine,

Such as ministered to Thee.

Keep, O keep us, Saviour dear,

Ever constant by Thy side;

That with Thee we may appear

At the eternal Eastertide.

Catherine Booton