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Play “Why Should We Start, and Fear to Die?”
Free same-meter accompaniment for Why Should We Start, and Fear to Die? (Isaac Watts): organ, piano or guitar playing the tune OLD 100TH (Louis Bourgeois) in four-part harmony, 4 verses, with the words on screen. Choose the key and speed, add an introduction, project the words on a TV, or practice your own choir part. Made for churches and home groups without a musician.
Sung here to OLD 100TH (Louis Bourgeois), a Long Meter (8.8.8.8) tune — not necessarily the tune usually paired with this text. Any tune in the same meter fits the words.
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- 1Why should we start, and fear to die?
- What timorous worms we mortals are!
- Death is the gate to endless joy,
- And yet we dread to enter there.
- 2The pains, the groans, the dying strife
- Fright our approaching souls away;
- And we shrink back again to life,
- Fond of our prison and our clay.
- 3Oh, if my Lord would come and meet,
- My soul would stretch her wings in haste,
- Fly fearless through death’s iron gate,
- Nor feel the terrors as she passed.
- 4Jesus can make a dying bed
- Feel soft as downy pillows are,
- While on his breast I lean my head,
- And breathe my life out sweetly there!
About this music
OLD 100TH — Louis Bourgeois. Setting: Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalter, 1561.. The score is from the Open Hymnal Project, copied from ccel from Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalter 1561. Words: "Hymnal and Canticles of the Protestant Episcopal Church", 1875, hymn 405.; music and setting are in the public domain. The words above are from the hymnal cited on the Why Should We Start, and Fear to Die? page.
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