“When Mr. Sank­ey lived at Co­has­set, Mas­sa­chu­setts, in the sum­mer of 1876, af­ter the great Bos­ton meet­ings, he ve­ry na­tur­al­ly de­sired to bring the Gos­pel to the peo­ple liv­ing in that neigh­bor­hood. Ac­cord­ing­ly, he in­vit­ed me,” wrote Mr. Need­ham on one oc­ca­sion,” to spend a week with him in a ser­ies of evan­gel­is­tic meet­ings. Be­fore the break­fast-hour one morn­ing, while Mr. San­key was play­ing on his or­gan, I re­marked: ‘I wish we had a good hymn on The Smit­ten Rock, as I hope to speak on that sub­ject to-night.’ Mr. Sank­ey re­plied with en­thu­siasm: ‘Here is a new hymn which came to me last night in my sleep; I be­lieve the Lord gave it to me. I wish I had words for it. Why don’t you write a piece on The Rock?’ I re­plied, ‘Why, I can’t write such a hymn as you want, and you know that I don’t un­der­stand mu­sic; how to fit words to your mu­sic would puz­zle an un­mu­sic­al man.’ The en­thu­si­as­tic so­lo­ist, still play­ing, said: ‘You’ll find pen and paper on the ta­ble; this is a stir­ring tune and I want the words; try your hand at it.’ I im­me­di­ate­ly sat down and asked the Lord’s spe­cial help, and then wrote the hymn as it now ap­pears. Mr. San­key took the pa­per, with the ink scarce­ly dry on it, and sang it through with the chor­us—the new air and the words ex­act­ly fit­ting, without al­ter­a­tion or amend­ment. ‘I think the Lord gave you the words as tru­ly as he gave me the tune,’ was Mr. San­key’s first re­mark. And then we com­mend­ed the lit­tle piece and its mu­sic to the great Mas­ter, pray­ing that the unc­tion of the Ho­ly One might rest upon it. Mr. Sank­ey sang the hymn for the first time in pub­lic that ev­en­ing, after I had given my ad­dress on The Smit­ten Rock.”