Elisha Albright Hoffman

Elisha Albright Hoffman was an American pastor, hymn writer, composer, and gospel-song editor born in Orwigsburg, Pennsylvania, in 1839. His father, Francis A. Hoffman, was a long-serving minister in the Evangelical Association, and sacred singing was part of the family's devotional life. Hoffman graduated in 1860 from Union Seminary in New Berlin, Pennsylvania, an Evangelical Association school, and spent eleven years working with the denomination's publishing interests in Cleveland. He had no extensive conservatory training; much of his musical formation came through family, church, and practical experience.

Hoffman later served Congregational and Presbyterian churches. A near-contemporary obituary records that he helped establish Grace Congregational Church and Cleveland's first Bohemian mission, then served Presbyterian congregations at Vassar and Benton Harbor, Michigan, and Cabery, Illinois. He retired in 1922 and was afterward honorary pastor of South Shore Presbyterian Church in Chicago.

He wrote more than two thousand gospel songs and edited numerous collections. Other enduring texts include Are You Washed in the Blood?, I Must Tell Jesus, Is Your All on the Altar?, and What a Wonderful Savior. For Leaning on the Everlasting Arms, Anthony J. Showalter supplied the initiating biblical idea and refrain, then asked Hoffman to write the stanzas, which Hoffman returned within a few days.