Jesus Paid It All

I hear the Savior say,
“Thy strength indeed is small,
Child of weakness, watch and pray,
Find in Me thine all in all.”

Refrain:
Jesus paid it all,
All to Him I owe;
Sin had left a crimson stain,
He washed it white as snow.

Lord, now indeed I find
Thy pow’r and Thine alone,
Can change the leper’s spots
And melt the heart of stone.

For nothing good have I
Where-by Thy grace to claim;
I’ll wash my garments white
In the blood of Calv’ry’s Lamb.

And when, before the throne,
I stand in Him complete,
“Jesus died my soul to save,”
My lips shall still repeat.
— Elvina M. Hall (1865)

On a warm summer Sunday in Baltimore in 1865, Elvina Hall took her place in the choir loft of Monument Methodist Episcopal Church. At first, the morning seemed no different from any other: familiar hymns, familiar faces, and Reverend George Schrick at the pulpit.

But as the pastor’s sermon lengthened, Hall’s thoughts drifted—not toward idle distractions, but toward Calvary. She began to ponder the cross and the immeasurable sacrifice of Jesus Christ. During Reverend Schrick’s extended prayer, an idea took hold of her.

With no writing paper at hand, Hall opened her hymnbook and began penciling verses onto its flyleaf. Line by line, the words came.

When the service ended, Hall approached Reverend Schrick. She may not have remembered every point of his sermon, but she carried something she believed was worth sharing. The pastor read the poem and was deeply moved.

Only days earlier, another member of the church, its organist John Grape, had brought Reverend Schrick a musical composition—a hymn tune with no words to accompany it. The pastor saw a possibility. He placed Hall’s newly written verses beside Grape’s melody, expecting that the words would need to be reshaped to fit the music.

Instead, to his astonishment, they matched almost perfectly.

Hall and Grape refined the hymn in the days that followed, joining her simple yet powerful testimony to his music. When they presented the finished work to Reverend Schrick, he recognized that something enduring had been born in their church.

At his encouragement, the hymn was sent to Professor Theodore Perkins for inclusion in Sabbath Carols. Perkins published it, carrying its message far beyond Baltimore.

More than a century and a half later, believers still sing the words first written on the flyleaf of Elvina Hall’s hymnbook: “Jesus Paid It All.”