Ira Sankey and the Song Found in a Newspaper

In the great revival meetings of the nineteenth century, when thousands gathered in halls on both sides of the Atlantic, one voice opened the door before the preacher ever spoke. The preacher was D. L. Moody. The singer was Ira D. Sankey. And together they changed how the gospel was carried, because Sankey proved that a song could reach a heart a sermon outline could not. He sang the invitation. He did not replace the preaching. He prepared it, he interpreted it, and he carried it into places where memory and feeling live. To stand in one of those crowded rooms was to hear the gospel before you understood it, sung low and tender over the noise of the world.

Now here is the story most often remembered about him, and it begins, of all places, on a train.

Sankey was travelling with Moody through Scotland. To pass the time, he bought a newspaper. As he turned the pages, looking for news of the war and the world, his eye caught something out of place. A poem, tucked into a corner of the paper. It told of a shepherd who had ninety and nine sheep safe in the fold, and one still lost out on the hills. The shepherd who would not rest while one was missing. The shepherd who went out into the dark and the cold to bring it home. Sankey felt the lines take hold of him. He tore the poem from the page and slipped it into his pocket, and there it stayed.

Days later, in a packed meeting, Moody finished preaching on the Good Shepherd. He turned to Sankey and asked him to sing something fitting to close. Sankey had nothing prepared. And in that silence, with the people waiting, he remembered the scrap of newspaper in his pocket. As the story is remembered, he spread the torn page across the organ, struck a chord he had never played before, and began to sing words he had never sung to a tune that did not yet exist. There were ninety and nine that safely lay in the shelter of the fold. He sang it through, line by line, not knowing how each verse would end until he reached it. The room fell utterly still. And when the last note died away, a song had been born in the open air of that meeting that would be sung for a hundred years.

That is the legend, and the heart of it is true. The poem was written by Elizabeth Clephane, who had already died before her words ever found a melody. She wrote of the lost sheep and never heard it sung. Sankey gave her quiet lines a voice that crossed oceans.

What lasted was not the trick of improvising a tune, and not the drama of the torn newspaper. What lasted was the picture itself. The shepherd who counts and finds one missing. The shepherd who leaves the safe and the settled to climb out after the one who cannot find the way home. That picture runs straight through Israel's Scriptures and into the words of Jesus. Bad shepherds scatter and exploit. The Lord seeks, and gathers, and carries the lost one back on his shoulders.

Ira Sankey understood that a song is not the same as a conversion, and that emotion is not surrender. A melody may open a heart, but it cannot finish the work. Still, he gave his whole gift to the opening of hearts, night after night, hall after hall, until his name was bound forever to Moody's and to the simple gospel songs that ordinary people could carry home and sing for themselves. He spent his voice on one errand. To make the seeking love of the Shepherd sound less like a doctrine and more like a door left open. And through that door, the lost kept coming home.