Ellwood Haines Stokes

Ellwood Haines Stokes was born in Medford, New Jersey, in 1815 and died at Ocean Grove in 1897. Hymnal and catalog records vary between Ellwood and Elwood; Ellwood is used here as the standardized authority form. Stokes entered Methodist Episcopal ministry in New Jersey and served congregations across the state. His pastoral work developed alongside the nineteenth-century camp-meeting and holiness movements, whose emphases on conversion, consecration, prayer, and sanctification shaped his devotional writing.

In 1869 Stokes became the first president of the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association and remained in that office until his death. The association remembers him as Ocean Grove's principal planner, a published poet, and a leader who helped develop the community's public services as well as its religious program. Hymnary attributes dozens of texts to him, though Hover O'er Me, Holy Spirit is by far the most widely circulated. He wrote the text in 1879, and John R. Sweney supplied its music. Their combined song was published as Fill Me Now in The Quiver of Sacred Song in 1880. The hymn remains a concise expression of Methodist holiness spirituality: admitted weakness, prayer for cleansing and comfort, and dependence on the Holy Spirit's sanctifying presence.