There'll be no Dark Valley

Words by the Rev. W. O. Cushing Music by Ira D. Sankey

“There'll be no dark valley when Jesus comes.
There'll be no dark valley when Jesus comes.”

One night during the Boxer revolt, when the Chinese had set fire to many buildings and it seemed as though all the missionaries and native Christians in a besieged city would be destroyed, the children belonging to the Junior Christian Endeavor Society held a meeting in a chapel. While the cracklings of the flames, the sharp report of the Chinese guns, and the cries of men and women running to and fro were rending the air, these little disciples of Jesus were singing: ”There'll be no dark valley when Jesus comes."

A missionary, working in the slums of a city in Ireland, writes me as follows: ”I feel constrained to thank you from the bottom of my soul for all the great blessings I have received from singing your songs. I am a worker in the slums of, and I find that your songs reach the hearts of fallen men and women before anything else. I have just returned home from our meeting, and the message I sang to-night was your sweet song: ' There'll be no dark valley when Jesus comes.' I want to thank you in particular for this song, because it presents death to us in such a glorious way. The old Welsh people used to speak and sing of death as something very fearful—a dark river, great waves and so on—and I remember my dear mother singing all the Welsh hymns referring to death, until I shuddered. But, praise the Lord, I know now that it is different. Your little song has confirmed this belief in me not only, but in many, many more souls."

I arranged this hymn from the words which Mr. W. O. Cushing wrote for me, of which, however, I used only the first line, ”There'll be no dark valley when Jesus comes ”It has of late become quite a favorite throughout the country.