Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Maltbie Davenport Babcock was an American Presbyterian minister, poet, and gifted amateur musician. Born in Syracuse, New York, he graduated from Syracuse University in 1879 and Auburn Theological Seminary in 1882. His pastorates took him from First Presbyterian Church in Lockport, New York, to Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church in Baltimore and finally to Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City. In Baltimore he became especially known for his ministry among students at Johns Hopkins University as well as his wider pastoral work.

Babcock loved music and the outdoors, interests that help explain the imagery of the poem later adapted as This Is My Father's World. A frequently repeated story connects the poem with his walks near Lockport and Lake Ontario, but the earliest located published version of that anecdote appears decades later, so the precise circumstances of composition are not firmly documented. What is certain is that the poem appeared posthumously in Thoughts for Every-Day Living in 1901 under the heading “My Father’s World,” in sixteen four-line stanzas.

Babcock died in Naples, Italy, in 1901 while returning from a journey that had included the Holy Land. His collected writings, including devotional prose and poetry, preserved a ministry cut short at forty-two and supplied the text from which this hymn was later formed.