Emily Divine Wilson

Emily Divine Wilson (1865–1942), often identified in hymnals as Mrs. J. G. Wilson, was an American church musician, composer, and writer associated with Methodist ministry in and around Philadelphia. She was born in Philadelphia on May 24, 1865, and married Methodist minister John G. Wilson. Hymnary records her as the composer of the tune HEAVEN and also catalogs several sacred texts under her name.

Wilson’s musical work was closely connected with the church life that surrounded her husband’s ministry. Later accounts of Philadelphia Methodism remembered her musical ability as an important contribution to local congregations, and hymnological sources associate the Wilsons with Methodist camp-meeting culture at Ocean Grove, New Jersey. Surviving biographical documentation is much thinner than that available for some contemporary gospel-song writers, so details of her formal musical training are not well established.

Her enduring place in hymnody rests chiefly on HEAVEN, the 1898 tune paired with Eliza Edmunds Hewitt’s When We All Get to Heaven. Hymnary also attributes to Wilson sacred texts such as The Story of Grace and I Will Pilot Thee. She died in Philadelphia on June 23, 1942. Her work represents the contribution of a church musician whose music moved from Methodist devotional settings into a much broader English-language hymnal tradition.