How Great Thou Art

The hymn had its beginning in 1886 in the mind of a Swedish lay preacher, Carl Boberg. A German translation appeared in 1907, and the singing of the German text spread throughout Germany. From the German text, a Russian translation was made and published in Moscow in 1927 in a Russian hymnal. That same year Stuart K. Hine, an English Methodist missionary to the western Ukraine, heard the song. Some years later, while working in a Carpathian mountain village in Czechoslovakia, he translated the first stanza into English during a thunderstorm. The “rolling thunder” of the storm is in the first stanza. Later Hine added the second and third stanzas that were not so much a translation as his own creation.

At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Hine returned to England. He added stanza four in 1948.  Hine printed the hymn in a Russian gospel magazine the following year, and subsequently printed it in leaflet form. One of the leaflets was given to George Beverly Shea during the Billy Graham Crusade in 1954. Shea and Cliff Barrows introduced the song in the meeting of the Toronto, Crusade in 1955. From Boberg’s first writing on the southeast coast of Sweden to the Toronto Crusade covered sixty-nine years.