Edward Mote (1797–1874) wrote this text in 1825, the day he heard news of the Ogle Castle shipwreck on the Goodwin Sands, a notorious ten-mile sandbank in the English Channel. The entire crew of over a hundred men was lost when rescue boats could not reach them. That disaster drove the hymn’s nautical imagery: the “sinking sand,” the “rough and stormy gale,” the “anchor holds,” the “sinking flood.” Mote completed the chorus and four stanzas in a single day, then brought the new text to a parishioner’s sick-bed the following week when her husband could not find the hymnbook. She enjoyed it so much that Mote added two more stanzas, printed a thousand copies, and submitted the text anonymously to The Spiritual Magazine. One historical detail tends to surprise singers: the familiar opening line “My hope is built on nothing less” was not Mote’s original first line; the hymn originally began, “Nor earth nor hell my soul can move, I rest upon unchanging love.”
Sung at Our Saviour
2026