How Sweet and Aweful is the Place

Melody - "St. Columba", ancient Irish melody

Isaac Watts, 1707

How sweet and aweful is the place
With Christ within the doors,
While everlasting love displays
The choicest of her stores!

2. Here every bowel of our God
With soft compassion rolls;
Here peace and pardon bought with blood
Is food for dying souls.

3. While all our hearts and all our songs
Join to admire the feast,
Each of us cry, with thankful tongues,
Lord, why was I a guest?

4. Why was I made to hear Thy voice,
And enter while there's room;
When thousands make a wretched choice,
And rather starve than come?

5. 'Twas the same love that spread the feast
That sweetly forced us in
Else we had still refused to taste,
And perished in our sin.

6. Pity the nations, O our God!
Constrain the earth to come;
Send Thy victorious Word abroad,
And bring the strangers home.

7. We long to see Thy churches full,
That all the chosen race
May with one voice, and heart, and soul,
Sing Thy redeeming grace.

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