The Solid Rock

"The Solid Rock" was written by Edward Mote, a London cabinetmaker, around 1834. Mote had grown up in extreme poverty — his parents were pub owners who never took him to church, and he later recalled that he had never heard a prayer until he was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker whose master introduced him to the gospel. One morning on his walk to work, the chorus "On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand; all other ground is sinking sand" came to his mind, and by the end of the day he had written the four stanzas. He tested the hymn that very Sunday when visiting a sick friend whose wife had forgotten the hymnbook — Mote pulled out his new composition, and they sang it at her bedside. The tune "Melita" (later replaced by William Bradbury's tune in 1863) carried the hymn across the Atlantic to America, where it became a pillar of evangelical worship. Mote eventually became a Baptist pastor and served faithfully for 21 years, reportedly declining the gift of his church's chapel building by saying, "I do not want the chapel; I only want the pulpit, and when I cease to preach Christ, then turn me out of that."