Blind from infancy, she wrote thousands of hymns. Fanny Crosby and “Blessed Assurance”

Fanny Crosby was about six weeks old when a medical treatment for an eye infection left her blind. She went on to write more than 8,000 hymns.

Among them is “Blessed Assurance”, still sung in churches across the world, from American congregations to Ghanaian Methodist and Presbyterian services. Its opening line, “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine”, is one of the most recognised in Christian music.

A tune first, then the words

In 1873, Crosby’s friend Phoebe Palmer Knapp, a composer and the wife of a wealthy businessman, played her a new melody on the piano. Knapp asked her what the tune said. Crosby is reported to have answered almost immediately with the first words of the hymn: “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! O what a foretaste of glory divine!”

The hymn expresses confidence in salvation and joy in a close relationship with Christ. Its refrain, “This is my story, this is my song, praising my Saviour all the day long”, has become a personal testimony for generations of believers.

Crosby’s life

Frances Jane Crosby was born in New York State in 1820. Her father died when she was a baby, and she was raised by her mother and grandmother, who taught her the Bible. She memorised large portions of scripture as a child.

She studied at the New York Institution for the Blind and later taught there. She wrote poems from a young age, met presidents, and spoke before the United States Congress, arguing for education for blind people. She married Alexander van Alstyne, a blind musician.

Thousands of hymns

Crosby wrote so many hymns that publishers asked her to use pseudonyms, so that hymn books would not appear to be filled with one writer’s work. Her best-known hymns include “To God Be the Glory”, “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Saviour”, “Rescue the Perishing”, “Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross” and “All the Way My Saviour Leads Me”. Many became famous through the evangelistic campaigns of Dwight L. Moody and Ira Sankey.

On her blindness

Crosby is widely quoted as saying that if she could have been given her sight, she would not accept it, because the first face she would see would be the face of her Saviour. Whether or not those were her exact words, her writing consistently treated her blindness without bitterness.

What believers take from her

Crosby’s life speaks to people facing limits of any kind. She did not wait for her circumstances to change before she served. She used what she had, a memory full of scripture, a gift for words and a strong faith, and she wrote hymns that have outlived her by more than a century. She died in 1915, aged 94.

Her gravestone in Bridgeport, Connecticut, is simple. It carries a few words that sum up her life: “Aunt Fanny: She hath done what she could.”