- Jewish Lines Found In A Hymn   - The Love of God is Greater Far In-Ah Lee column     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 aboveWould drain the ocean dry;Nor could the scroll contain the whole,Though stretched from sky to sky. Oh, love of God, how rich and pure!How measureless and strong!It shall forevermore endure?The saints’ and angels’ song.       This hymn was written by Frederick Martin Lehman, inspired by a piece of Jewish poem.     He  was born in Schwerin, Germany in 1868 and immigrated to America with his family when he was four. At age eleven, he had a conversion experience and grew to be a pastor at the Church of the Nazarene and became a very prolific writer and composer of hymns throughout his life.     When Lehman wrote this particular hymn in 1917 he was living in California and due to financial hardships had to do hard manual labor, packing oranges and lemons into wooden crates. He later gives an account of how the song came about:       While at camp-meeting in a midwestern state, some fifty years ago in our early ministry, an evangelist climaxed his message by quoting the last stanza of this song. The profound depths of the line moved us to preserve the words for future generations.     Not until we had come to California did this urge find fulfillment, and that at a time when circumstances forced us to hard manual labor. One day, during short intervals of inattention to our work, we picked up a scrap of paper and, seated upon an empty lemon box pushed against the wall, with a stub pencil, added the (first) two stanzas and chorus of the song … Since the lines (3rd stanza from the Jewish poem) had been found penciled on the wall of a patient’s room in an i

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