I am told that Fanny Crosby is in the Guinness Book of Records for writing the largest number of hymns - nearly 9,000.
This remarkable lady was born in New England in 1820 and lived to one month short of her 95th birthday in 1915. When she was six weeks old, the doctor was called to attend to an eye infection. He arranged for hot poultices to be put on both eyes. These burnt the corneas, scar tissue formed, and as a result, she was blinded. Yet at no point in her life did she ever complain or hold a grudge. In fact, she saw it as the means God used to make her life's work possible.
Her parents called themselves Puritans and were in fact psalm-singing Calvinistic Presbyterians. The church was too poor to provide every worshipper with a psalm book, so a man stood at the front and sang a line which the congregation then repeated. Her absolute confidence in the Bible as the Word of God derives from those early years at home when she learned a large number of Bible books by heart.
