O Jesus, cleanse my soul from sin:
Thy bitter death, Thy precious blood
For me eternal glory win.

By Thee redeemed, I have no fear,
When now I leave this mortal clay,
With joy before Thy throne I come;
God's own must die, yet live alway.

Welcome, O death! thou bringest me
To dwell with God eternally;
Through Christ my soul from sin is free,
O take me now, dear Lord, to Thee!

Another hymn for the dying, "Lord Jesus Christ, true man and God,"
breathes the same spirit of hope and trust in Christ. During the years of
persecution and suffering that followed the Reformation, the Protestants
found much comfort in singing Eber's "When in the hour of utmost need."

Justus Jonas, the bosom friend of Luther who spoke the last words of
peace and consolation to the dying Reformer and who also preached his
funeral sermon, has left us the hymn, "If God were not upon our side,"
based on Psalm 124.

From this period we also have the beautiful morning hymn, "My inmost
heart now raises," by Johannes Mathesius, the pupil and biographer of
Luther, and an equally beautiful evening hymn, "Sunk is the sun's last
beam of light," by Nicholas Hermann. Mathesius was pastor of the church
at Joachimsthal, in Bohemia, and Hermann was his organist and
choirmaster. It is said that whenever Mathesius preached a particularly
good sermon, Hermann was forthwith inspired to write a hymn on its theme!
He was a poet and musician of no mean ability, and his tunes are among
the best from the Reformation period.

The example of the Wittenberg hymnists was quickly followed by
evangelicals in other parts of Germany, and hymn-books began to appear
everywhere. As early as 1526 a little volume of hymns was published at
Rostock in the Platt-Deutsch dialect. In this collection we find one of
the most glorious hymns of the Reformation, "All glory be to Thee, Most
High," or, as it has also been rendered, "All glory be to God on high," a
metrical version of the ancient canticle, _Gloria in Excelsis_. Five
years later another edition was published in which appeared a metrical
rendering of _Agnus Dei_:

O Lamb of God, most holy,
On Calvary an offering;
Despised, meek, and, lowly,
Thou in Thy death and suffering
Our sins didst bear, our anguish;
The might of death didst vanquish;
Give us Thy peace, O Jesus!

The author of both of these gems of evangelical hymnody was N