Paul Gerhardt was one of those minstrels of experience who are-- "Cradled into poetry by wrong, And learn in suffering what they teach in song." He was a graduate of that school when he wrote his "Hymn of Trust:" Commit thou all thy griefs And ways into His hands; To His sure trust and tender care Who earth and heaven commands. Thou on the Lord rely, So, safe, shalt thou go on; Fix on His work thy steadfast eye, So shall thy work be done. * * * * * Give to the winds thy fears; Hope, and be undismayed; God hears thy sighs and counts thy tears, He shall lift up thy head. Through waves and clouds and storms He gently clears thy way; Wait thou His time, so shall this night Soon end in joyous day. Gerhardt was born at Grafenheinchen, Saxony, 1606. Through the first and best years of manhood's strength (during the Thirty Years' War), a wandering preacher tossed from place to place, he was without a parish and without a home. After the peace of Westphalia he settled in the little village of Mittenwalde. He was then forty-four years old. Four years later he married and removed to a Berlin church. During his residence there he buried his wife, and four of his children, was deposed from the ministry because his Lutheran doctrines offended the Elector Frederick, and finally retired as a simple arch-deacon to a small parish in Lubben, where he preached, toiled, and suffered amid a rough and uncongenial people till he died, Jan. 16, 1676. Few men have ever lived whose case more needed a "Hymn of Trust"--and fewer still could have written it themselves. Through all those trial years he was pouring forth his soul in devout verses, making in all no less than a hundred and twenty-five hymns--every one of them a comfort to others as well as to himself. He became a favorite, and for a time _the_ favorite, hymn-writer of all the German-speaking people. Among these tones of calm faith and joy we recognize today (in the English tongue),-- Since Jesus is my Friend, Thee, O Immanuel, we praise, All my heart this night rejoices, How shall I meet Thee, --and the English translation of his "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden," turned into German by himself from St. Bernard Clairvaux's "Salve caput cruentatum," and made dear to us in Rev. James Alexander's beautiful lines-- O sacred head now wounded, With grief and shame weighed down, Now scornfully surrounded With thorns, Thine only crown. _THE TUNE._ A plain-song by Alexander Reinagle is used by some congregations, but is not remarkably expressive. Reinagle, Alexander Robert, (1799-1877) of Kidlington, Eng., was organist to the church of St. Peter-in-the-East, Oxford.