05/08/2026
Fascinating history can be found on Facebook. Quakers still don't sing hymns nor use any form of programming in our worship. We still sit in silence and aim to cultivate our direct relationship with God.
He was a Quaker who thought singing in church was spiritually dangerous. Someone turned his criticism of emotional worship into one of the most loved hymns in the English-speaking world. He had been dead for years before it happened.
John Greenleaf Whittier was one of the most celebrated American poets of the 19th century — an abolitionist, a journalist, and a lifelong Quaker. As a Quaker, he belonged to a tradition that held corporate singing in worship to be a human addition that cluttered the direct relationship between the soul and God. Quaker meetings were held in silence, punctuated only by spoken ministry when the Spirit moved someone to speak. There was no organ. No choir. No hymns.
Whittier never wrote a hymn. He had no interest in writing hymns.
In 1872, he wrote a long poem called "The Brewing of Soma" — a reference to an ancient Hindu intoxicating ritual drink used to induce religious ecstasy. The poem's argument was pointed: that much of what passed for religious experience, including certain forms of enthusiastic worship, was not genuine encounter with God but a kind of spiritual intoxication — emotionalism mistaken for the divine.
Whittier was, in a real sense, criticising the kind of worship that produced and used hymns.
Near the end of this critical poem, the tone shifted. Having named what worship was not, Whittier wrote what he believed it should be — a passage of quiet, still, submissive prayer:
"Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways. Reclothe us in our rightful mind; in purer lives thy service find, in deeper reverence, praise."
He was writing about Quaker stillness. About silence before God. About the stripping away of noise and excitement in favour of something quieter and deeper.
He died in 1892.
In 1906, English musician Hubert Parris set six stanzas of "The Brewing of Soma" to music — the passage beginning with those lines. The resulting hymn was included in hymnals of the Church of England and spread rapidly through Anglican worship.
"Be still, and know that I am God." — Psalm 46:10
