Jesus Loves Me This I Know: The Remarkable Story Behind the World's Most Beloved Children's Song

"They were quite a sight...the sisters both dressed in old, rustling silk dresses...cut from the same pattern for forty years, and...looked like displaced characters from one of their own novels." Just don't picture Susan and Anna doing needlepoint! They also sketched, rowed, gardened and entertained. More amazingly, for forty years the Warner sisters faithfully taught the Bible to eager Cadets at West Point. Impoverished much of their lives, yet patriotic always, they deeded their family home - Constitution Island across from West Point - to the Military Academy. In 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt acknowledged the "singular generosity" on behalf of a grateful nation. This beautifully illustrated small book makes for an easy, but rewarding read. I didn't underline or overthink a thing, but simply basked in the warmth of an unusual story well told. How many Cadets, I wonder smilingly, had a grand reunion with the Warner Sisters in heaven?

This is a charming book, and although small, it is filled with a full account of the wonderful story of what is perhaps the best-known hymn in the English language, "Jesus Loves Me, This I Know." Robert J. Morgan recounts the tale of Anna B Warner and her sister Susan, from their life of privilege in Manhattan to reduced circumstances, living in the shadow of the ramparts of the U S Military Academy at West Point. From their island home on the Hudson they offered hospitality and Bible Study to cadets, and a sense of home as well. They wrote for a living, and the text of the hymn appeared in a novel which the sisters co-authored, called "Say and Seal". Soon thereafter, people were eager to be able to sing them; thus, William Bradbury wrote the tune to go with it that we know and can sing by heart. And in case we think that the theology is too simplistic, all we need remember is that the most celebrated theologian of the 20th Century, Dr. Karl Barth, considered the hymn the greatest theological discovery he ever made. This is a good book to read and to give. Christian educators and pastors will especially relish the text and the accompanying archival photographs. The story of the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington is an added bonus.

Few of us remember that this "children's song" has its roots with young men preparing for their military careers. When I took a trip to that academy and saw the links of that chain that once went across the river, protecting our country from foreign invasion, it pictured to me the chains of love that Jesus holds us with, not only in the young and innocent parts of our life, but also in our later life....no man can pluck us out of his loving hands...for Jesus loves me this I KNOW!