As the men gathered around the dinner table recalled their happy bygone student days, they particularly recollected the lofty phrasings of their mentor’s prayers. They rehearsed his most striking and memorable catchphrases — many of which now shaped cadences of their own prayer vocabulary. Realizing the riches that their conversation had uncovered, Walter Chalmers Smith began to scribble down their remembrances on a scrap of paper he retrieved from his frock coat. A few days later he transcribed the notes into his commonplace journal, realizing he had the puzzle-piece makings for lyrics that would beautifully balance in adoration of the Lord both the intimate and ineffable.

In 1857, shortly after he was installed as the new pastor of the Roxburgh Free Church on Hill Square adjacent to the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, Walter Chalmers Smith (1824-1908), began to compose congregational hymns to complement his sermons. He was inspired by the example of the unrivaled father of English hymnody, Isaac Watts, who wrote more than a thousand hymns and psalm settings, often to accompany his sermons at the Mark Lane Chapel across from Tower Hill in London. Ten years later Smith would publish what he would call “the choicest of my labors” in Hymns of Christ and the Christian Life.

The collection included the hymns, “Earth Was Waiting, Spent and Restless,” “Lord, God, Omnipotent,” “Our Portion Is Not Here,” “There Is No Wrath to Be Appeased,” “Faint and Weary, Jesus Stood,” and the classic for which he is best known today, “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise.”

Smith was born in Aberdeen, the son of Walter and Barbara Smith, and named for both his father and the great Scottish Reformer Thomas Chalmers. His father was a master cabinetmaker and a Reform-minded deacon in the Church of Scotland, so his son was faithfully raised in the lively days of evangelical resurgence during the Ten Years Conflict and the Disruption.

He was educated at the Aberdeen grammar school and at the University of Aberdeen’s Marischal College. After graduation in1841 he began to study for a legal profession but two years later – during the tumult of the Disruption – his faith was stirred to ardency by the example of Dr. Chalmers. He sensed a call to gospel ministry and determined to enter the newly established Free Church’s theological seminary, New College, Edinburgh.

On Christmas morning 1850 he was ordained as the pastor of the Chadwell Street Scottish Free Church in Islington, London, a neighborhood then undergoing dramatic renewal with the construction of the nearby King’s Cross railway station. In 1853 he was called back to Scotland to serve at Milnathort in the parish of Orwell, Kinross-shire. In 1862 he was chosen to succeed Robert Buchanan, who with Dr. Chalmers had been one of the leaders of the Disruption, as pastor at the Free Tron Church, Glasgow. In 1876 he was called to the Free High Kirk, which worshipped in the beautiful New College building designed by William Playfair on the Edinburgh Castle Mound site of the old palace of Princess Regent Mary of Guise. The capstone of his ministry came in 1893 when he was chosen to serve as Moderator of the General Assembly for the Free Church of Scotland.

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