Hymn #532: Come, Labor On | First Congregational Church

Jane Laurie Borthwick (1813-1897) based this text on two Gospel passages in which Jesus employs the metaphor of the harvest (Matthew 9:37-38 and John 4:35-37). She first included it in her Thoughts for Thoughtful Hours (1859) and then revised it for the 1863 edition of that work.

Jane L. Borthwick is better remembered for translating hymns from German into English than for her own poetry. A member of the Free Church of Scotland, she supported various missionary projects, including work in Singapore, Labrador, and in her native Edinburgh, Scotland.

Thomas Tertius Noble (1867-1953) wrote the tune ORA LABORA for this text, and they were first published together in The New Hymnal (1918). Noble lived in the United States, but his works have been compared favorably to some of the great English unison tunes by Charles Villiers Stanford and C. Hubert H. Parry.

T. Tertius Noble was an English organist of note, and his wife was the daughter of an Anglican bishop. They moved to the United States in 1913 when he accepted a position at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, New York City, where he served for thirty years.