Philip Bliss and a Tune Carried through Tragedy

In the years after the American Civil War, when revival tents rose across the great cities and gospel singing filled the air, there lived a man whose voice and tunes carried thousands into worship. His name was Philip Paul Bliss. He was tall and warm and gifted, a singer and songwriter who travelled the revival circuit beside the famous evangelists of his day. He wrote melodies that ordinary congregations could lift on a first hearing, and he gave the church songs it still sings. Among them was a tune that would come to carry one of the deepest griefs ever set to music.

The words were not his own. A man named Horatio Spafford had lost his four daughters at sea, and out of that unspeakable sorrow he wrote a poem that began, It is well, it is well with my soul. Spafford gave the church the words. Bliss gave the church the tune. And so two lives, distinct and separate, were joined in a single song that would meet countless people at the edge of their own grief. The melody did not erase the sorrow in those words. It gave the sorrow a shape. It let a whole congregation sing what they could not have spoken alone.

Now listen, for the man who wrote that tune would soon walk through a tragedy of his own.

It was the closing days of 1876. Philip Bliss and his wife Lucy were travelling by train through the cold of the American north. Snow was falling. The train came to a river crossing near the town of Ashtabula, in Ohio, where a great iron bridge spanned the gorge. As the train moved out across that bridge in the dark, the structure gave way beneath it. The carriages plunged into the ravine below. And then came fire. It was one of the worst railway disasters of the century. Philip Bliss was thirty-eight years old. He and Lucy both perished there in the snow and the wreckage at Ashtabula. The man whose music had carried so many through grief did not himself escape it.

There is no neat ending to fasten onto this. No tidy lesson that makes the disaster easy to read. The hymn histories that retell it resist the urge to explain every detail, and so should we. A young writer whose tunes served Christian hope died suddenly and terribly, and the church was left holding the songs he left behind.

And hold them it did. For this is how the church has always sung. Israel sang words handed down through generations, words older than any single voice in the room. The church receives its hymns the same way, as gifts passed from hand to hand through fragile human lives. Behind the melody you sing on a Sunday morning there is often a name you have forgotten and a story you never knew, a writer who laboured and suffered and was gone before his work was fully loved. Philip Bliss is one of those names. He gave the tune. He did not live to see how far it would travel.

It Is Well with My Soul still rises in churches across the world, sung by people standing at gravesides and hospital beds and in the quiet after loss. Its power has never come from pretending that grief is small. It comes from the truth that trust and sorrow can sit side by side, that lament and praise can share a single breath. That is the gift Spafford and Bliss left together. One man wrote it out of the loss of his children. The other set it to music and then, soon after, was carried by that same fragile life into the very darkness his tune was made to hold. The tune carried grief. It did not solve it. And perhaps that is exactly why the church has never stopped singing it.