Hymn #403: My Hope Is Built on Nothing Less | First Congregational Church

Edward Mote (1797-1874) wrote this text on the “Gracious Experience of a Christian” during 1834, while he was working as a cabinetmaker in a suburb of London, England. It appears in his collection Hymns of Praise, A New Selection of Gospel Hymns (1836). The refrain was added in 1863.

Edward Mote spent his professional life as a cabinetmaker, but at age fifty-five he constructed a church building for a Baptist congregation in Horsham, England. He then became their pastor and served the church for the next twenty-one years until ill health forced him to resign his pulpit in 1873.

William Batchelder Bradbury (1816-1868) wrote the tune SOLID ROCK for Mote’s text in 1863 and added the refrain at that time. It was published in The Devotional Hymn and Tune Book (1864) in Philadelphia. This was the only Baptist hymnal to be published during the Civil War.

William B. Bradbury was one of the foremost composers of early gospel music in the United States. Encouraged by Lowell Mason, another prolific gospel tune writer, he not only served as church organist but organized many music festivals at Baptist Tabernacle in New York City.