"The Lord is the Rock eternal." Isaiah 26:4
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Words: Augustus Montague Toplady, 1776. An unsubstantiated story says the lyrics were inspired when Toplady took shelter from a storm under a rocky overhang near England's Cheddar Gorge; he reportedly wrote the words on a playing card.
Music: "Toplady," Thomas Hastings, 1830
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This hymn was sung at the funeral of William Gladstone in Westminster Abbey, London, England. Prince Albert of Britain asked it be sung to him as he lay dying. In Hymns That Have Helped, W. T. Stead stated:
…when the London went down in the Bay of Biscay, January 11, 1866, the last thing which the last man who left the ship heard as the boat pushed off from the doomed vessel was the voices of the passengers singing "Rock of Ages."
Francis Arthur Jones relates another story in Famous Hymns and Their Authors (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1902):
A missionary…complained of the slow progress made in India in converting the natives on account of explaining the teachings of Christianity so that the ignorant people could understand them. Some of the most beautiful passages in the Bible, for instance are destroyed by translation. He attempted to have [Rock of Ages] translated into the native dialect, so that the natives might appreciate its beauty. The work was entrusted to a young Hindu Bible student who had the reputation of being something of a poet. The next day he brought his translation for approval, and his rendering, as translated back into English, read like this:
Very old stone, split for my benefit,
Let me absent myself under one of your fragments.