1 How sweet and awful 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 forc'd us in,
Else we had still refus'd to taste,
And perish'd 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.]