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1. To Jesus’ Heart, all burning With fervent love for men, My heart with fondest yearning Shall raise its joyful strain. |
REFRAIN While ages course along, Blest be with loudest song The Sacred Heart of Jesus By ev’ry heart and tongue! The Sacred Heart of Jesus By ev’ry heart and tongue! |
2. O Heart for me on fire With love no man can speak; My yet untold desire God gives me for Thy sake. REFRAIN |
3. Too true I have forsaken Thy love by willful sin; Yet now let me be taken Back to Thy fold again. REFRAIN |
4. As Thou art meek and lowly, And ever pure of heart, So may my heart be wholly Of Thine the counterpart, REFRAIN |
5. O that to me were given The pinions of a dove, I’d speed aloft to heaven, My Jesus’ love to prove. REFRAIN |
6. When life away is flying, And earth’s false glare is done; Still, Sacred heart, in dying I’ll say I’m all Thine own. REFRAIN |
Amen. |
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The hymn “To Jesus’ Heart All Burning” was quite well known during World War II due to its inclusion in the “Song and Service Book for Ship and Field Army and Navy” as well as the parallel Chapel edition “The Hymnal Army and Navy” (1942).
Numerous millions were included in the duffel bags of sailors and soldiers.
The little, rugged and handsomely bound ship and field book contains the Stations of the Cross, used on this site, able to be used within an appropriately equipped chapel or indeed anywhere.
“To Jesus’ Heart All Burning” appears consciously to be a composition of the College Fight Song genre, though it would have been performed by servicemen themselves in a more reverential form.
With lack of privacy, and lack of the normal segregation between religious congregations the folks at home had always experienced— to get a sense of the times, in the 1921 Army-Navy Hymnal, while there were “Catholic” and “Jewish” sections, the Protestant section of the hymnal was listed as “Patriotic”, perhaps implying that the other, minority confessions were other than patriotic—servicemen deployed far throughout the world, in practice shared each others’ religious services. Thus, millions of non-Catholics received exposure to the message of the Sacred Heart which they would otherwise not have received.