Truth Reflects upon Our Senses
273

Text: authorship of verses uncertain;
chorus by M. E. Abbey
Music: Charles Davis Tillman (1861–1943)
Tune name: RAILWAY TO HEAVEN

In singing these words, each of us pledges to obey the admonition spoken by Jesus in Matthew 7:1: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” The comparison of the mote and the beam from this same scriptural passage drives home this important precept—”judge not”—and reminds us that if we disobey it, we displease our Lord and pay a great personal price in the form of remorse.

Latter- day Saints have an added understanding of Matthew 7:1 because of a significant word added in the Joseph Smith Translation of the King James Version of the Bible: “Judge not unrighteously, that ye be not judged.”

President Nathan Eldon Tanner, in his book Seek Ye First the Kingdom of God, offered some important counsel that correlates closely with the message of this hymn: “Let us remember . . . that the further out of line or out of tune we ourselves are, the more we are inclined to look for error or weaknesses in others and to try to rationalize and justify our own faults rather than to try to improve ourselves” ([Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1973], 57).

For many years the authorship of the verses, first published in the Manchester hymnal in 1840, has been attributed to Eliza R. Snow. However, the name of Eliza R. Snow was not linked with this text in the Manchester hymnal or in any other publication during her lifetime; in 1905, some eighteen years after her death, an LDS hymnbook listed her as the author, and the erroneous attribution has persisted. Research by Brett Nelson and others has located these verses in early Protestant hymnody, under the title “The Mote and the Beam” (Sabbath School Bell #2 [New York: Horace Waters, 1860], 2; and Hymns of Progress [Boston: Levi Coonley, 1864], 49). Both these hymnals attribute the text to “S. H.” A differing attribution, to “Elder William Laues,” appears on an undated broadsheet located in the Brown University Library. The text of the chorus is correctly attributed to M. E. Abbey.

In 1909, when the editors of Deseret Sunday School Songs included this text, they chose a familiar tune that Charles Tillman had written for a text by M. E. Abbey called “Life’s Railway to Heaven.” But this hymn tune

continued on with a chorus; the text was too short to fill out the music. The editors needed two more lines of verse to go with the chorus of this tune, and their solution was just to use M. E. Abbey’s original words for the chorus. As a grafted- on addition, they do not correlate particularly well with the verse.

Here are the words to the first verse of “Life’s Railway to Heaven”:

Life is like a mountain railroad, with an engineer that’s brave;
We must make the run successful, from the cradle to the grave;
Watch the curves, the fills, the tunnels; never falter, never quail;
Keep your hand upon the throttle, and your eye upon the rail.