Bessie's Poem

Six years after her homegoing, Elizabeth Clephane’s poem “The Lost Sheep” caught the eye of well-known evangelistic meeting song leader and music composer Ira Sankey. He noticed it in a newspaper he was reading on a train. The poem was simply signed, “Bessie.”

Turning to his companion, evangelist Dwight L. Moody himself, Sankey began to read the poem with all the expression he could muster. Both were exhausted from three months of meetings and were headed to Glasgow for more meetings.

After reading, Sankey asked Moody what he thought of the poem, only to find Moody completely distracted with reading something else. Sankey tore the poem out of the paper and tucked it into his pocket to save for another time. He thought it would make a perfect hymn set to music.

During the meetings in Glasgow, another influential pastor, Horatious Bonar, had spoken a short message on “The Good Shepherd.” Moody turned to Sankey and asked if he could sing an appropriate solo to close the service.

Caught off guard, Sankey stepped to the organ and, feeling impressed by the Holy Spirit to do so, placed the newspaper slip in front of him and began to play, compose and sing the poem as a hymn for the first time. We know it as "The Ninety and Nine."

Sankey described the moment like this:

“Note by note the tune was given, which has not been changed from that day to this. As the singing ceased a great sigh seemed to go up from the meeting, and I knew that the song had reached the hearts of my Scotch audience.”

God was not done working, however. Elizabeth Clephane’s sister just happened to be in the audience and wrote Ira Sankey to tell him more about the hymn’s writer. When Sankey published the hymn, he was sure to attribute the text to Elizabeth C. Clephane.