Nothing But...
As I've been playing and singing my way through Grandma's hymnal, I've noticed a thing or two. First of all, those songwriters way back then, a hundred years ago or more, seemed to be obsessed with death. It seems like nearly every hymn has a verse in it about leaving this earth and going to heaven; a significant number of songs have death and eternal life as their whole theme. Perhaps this is evidence of how sheltered and spoiled we have become in the twenty-first century. The average life span in the U.S. is nearly eighty now; in 1930, the average life expectancy was less than 60; one hundred fifty years ago, the average life lasted just thirty-five or forty years. It's easy to understand why people were once so concerned about death and eternal life when many children didn't live past infancy and many mothers died in childbirth. In nineteenth century America, a diagnosis of tuberculosis or cancer was always a death sentence, and it wasn't unusual for ...