Words: , 1906

Music: :

During a cam­paign in To­ron­to, Ca­na­da, young con­vert with whom I was deal­ing ex­pressed the fear that he would not be able to “hold out.” A day or two lat­er in a let­ter to Miss Ada Ha­ber­shon, of Lon­don, I men­tioned the need for a song which would give def­in­ite as­sur­ance of suc­cess in the Christ­ian life. The weeks passed and a cou­ple of months lat­er dur­ing a great cam­paign in Phil­a­del­phia, U.S.A., I re­ceived a batch of sev­en new songs writ­ten by Miss Ha­ber­shon. As Dr. Tor­rey preached his ser­mon one af­ter­noon (in­stead of list­en­ing!) I oc­cu­pied the time in set­ting the sev­en lyr­ics to mu­sic. One of these was “He will hold me fast.” The same ev­en­ing it was in­tro­duced by Chas. M. Al­ex­an­der to an au­dience of 4,000 peo­ple. Its suc­cess was im­me­di­a­te, and it has con­tin­ued to be a great fa­vour­ite. It has been trans­lat­ed in­to ma­ny lang­uag­es.

Robert Harkness