Thankful Thoughts--God's Love

2. The Love of God by Frederick M. Lehman, 1917
3. 
   
4. The love of God is greater far
5. Than tongue or pen can ever tell;
   It goes beyond the highest star,
   And reaches to the lowest hell;
   The guilty pair, bowed down with care,
   God gave His Son to win;
   His erring child He reconciled,
   And pardoned from his sin.
6. • Refrain:
     Oh, love of God, how rich and pure!
     How measureless and strong!
     It shall forevermore endure—
     The saints’ and angels’ song.

Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade;
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.

The last verse was penciled on the wall of a narrow room in an insane asylum by a man said to have been demented. The profound lines were discovered when they laid him in his coffin. The poem had its roots in a long Jewish poem written in the eleventh century in Germany. The Jewish poem, Hadamut, in the Aramaic language, has ninety couplets. It was composed, in the year 1096, by Rabbi Mayer, son of Isaac Nehorai, who was a cantor in the city of Worms, Germany.