John Newton wrote the words in England and they were published in 1779. Newton had commanded slave ships before his conversion, and he went on commanding them for years afterwards. That is worth knowing when you sing the line about a wretch, because he was not writing about somebody else.

Carl Boberg wrote this in Swedish in 1885, as "O Store Gud". The English words most churches sing are Stuart Hine's, and they came into English the long way round, through a German translation and then a Russian one. What we sing is several removes from what Boberg wrote.

The Irish text is attributed to Dallán Forgaill in the sixth century, which makes it older than everything else on this list by something like a thousand years. Mary Byrne translated it out of Old Irish in 1905 and Eleanor Hull set her translation into verse in 1912. The tune is the folk melody Slane.

Henry Francis Lyte wrote it in 1847, in the last months of his life, while he was dying of tuberculosis. Knowing that changes the hymn. The evening he asks God to stay through is not only an evening.

Charles Wesley wrote the text in England in 1747, building it on the meter of a Purcell song. It has been matched with a long queue of tunes since, which is why you may well know it to a different melody than the person standing next to you.

This is the Scottish Psalter's metrical version of Psalm 23, from 1650, most often sung to Crimond. The words are the psalm itself, bent only as far as the meter demanded. Singing it is about as close as a congregation comes to singing scripture straight.

Reginald Heber wrote it for Trinity Sunday and it was published in 1826. The opening line is lifted from the song of the living creatures in Revelation 4:8, so a congregation singing it is repeating what John heard.

Augustus Toplady, in England, published in 1775. The rock is Christ, and the hymn asks for shelter in him on the plain ground that the singer has nothing of his own worth offering.

Horatio Spafford wrote it in 1873, after all four of his daughters drowned when the Ville du Havre went down. He is said to have written it while crossing the same stretch of water.

Thomas Chisholm wrote it in the United States in 1923, out of Lamentations 3:22-23. There is no disaster behind this one. Chisholm said it came out of God's ordinary daily faithfulness rather than any single crisis, which is most of what the hymn is about.