Understand your hymns

Question: 

The hymn "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing" includes the phrase, "Here I raise mine Ebenezer; hither by thy help I'm come."  To what biblical event does that refer?

Answer: 

The defeat of the Philistines under the leadership of the prophet Samuel in 1 Samuel 7.  The actual line is in verse 12.  The word "ebenezer" in Hebrew means "stone of help."

You can watch a video of the hymn being sung by the BYU Combined Chorus below.  Watch it.  It's stunning.  Kudos to Tantara Records, the copyright holder, for allowing the piece to be available on YouTube.

 The hymn was written by Robert Robinson in 1758.

The music is NETTLETON, John Wyeth's Repository of Sacred Music, Part Second, 1813.

If your computer can't handle the video, you can hear a simple version of the hymn here.  It sounds almost obscene next to the other rendering, but so it goes.  More churches sound like that than the BYU Chorus!