Words: , 1877.

Music: . This song was writ­ten while Steb­bins was help­ing Dr. George Pen­te­cost in evan­gel­is­tic meet­ings in Wor­ces­ter, Mass­a­chu­setts:

During those meet­ings, one of the sub­jects preached up­on was the “New Birth.” While pre­sent­ing the truth, en­forc­ing it by re­fer­ring to var­i­ous pass­ag­es of Scrip­ture, Dr. Pen­te­cost quot­ed our Lord’s words to Ni­co­dem­us, “Ver­i­ly, ver­i­ly, I say un­to thee, ye must be born again”…It oc­curred to me that by tak­ing the line “Ver­i­ly, ver­i­ly, I say un­to thee,” from the third verse, and put­ting it with the line, “Ye must be born again,” and by trans­fer­ring the word “I” from the mid­dle of the first line to the be­gin­ning, so it would read, “I ver­i­ly, ver­i­ly, say un­to thee, Ye must be born again,” those pas­sag­es would then fall in­to rhyth­mic­al form, and by the use of some re­pe­ti­tions could be made avail­a­ble for a mu­sic­al set­ting, and al­so for a chor­us to the hymn, if some suit­a­ble vers­es could be found…I spoke to Rev­er­end…Sleep­er, one of the pas­tors of the ci­ty who some­times wrote hymns, of my im­press­ion and asked him if he would write me some vers­es on the sub­ject. He act­ed at once on my sug­gest­ion and soon af­ter came to me with the hymn…Be­fore the meet­ings closed a mu­sic­al set­ting was made.

George Stebbins, Mem­oirs and Rem­i­nis­cenc­es