Charles Austin Miles

Charles Austin Miles, usually credited as C. Austin Miles, was an American gospel-song writer, composer, editor, and former pharmacist. Born in Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1868, he studied at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and the University of Pennsylvania and worked as a pharmacist before turning increasingly to gospel music. After leaving pharmacy in 1892, he supplied songs to the Hall-Mack Publishing Company and later became a full-time music editor there, continuing in publishing work for decades.

Miles wrote both words and music and was credited with hundreds of gospel songs. Among his better-known works are “A New Name in Glory,” “Dwelling in Beulah Land,” and “If Jesus Goes with Me.” His career placed him within the commercial gospel-song tradition that supplied Sunday schools, revival meetings, evangelistic campaigns, and Protestant congregations with new repertoire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

For “In the Garden,” Miles was both text writer and composer. His later first-person account says that the song arose in March 1912 during an imaginative meditation on John 20, especially Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the risen Christ. The words and the tune GARDEN were published together that year.