A sure and tried foundation stone

The historical record of James Montgomery's hymnody reveals a curious instance where a writer's own rapid creative output directly limited the success of an earlier piece.

Composed on September 4, 1822, "A sure and tried foundation stone" was written specifically for the formal ceremony marking the laying of the foundation stone at St. Philip's Church in Sheffield. The text was immediately printed broadside for the local congregation to use during the service, and the original manuscript was preserved within the Montgomery Manuscripts collection.

Despite its initial local utility, the hymn experienced incredibly limited adoption in the wider church landscape. This stagnation was primarily caused by Montgomery himself. Just one month later, in October 1822, he penned a sibling hymn on the exact same theme: "This stone to Thee in faith we lay."

The latter work achieved immediate, sweeping popularity due to what contemporary critics termed its superior structural excellence. When compiling his influential collection The Christian Psalmist in 1825, Montgomery actively chose to include the October hymn while completely omitting "A sure and tried foundation stone" from all of his early published volumes. It remained excluded from his major anthologies until three decades later, when he finally gave it a permanent place as Number 296 in his Original Hymns (1853), under the generic heading "On Laying the Foundation Stone of a Place of Worship." The text consists of 5 stanzas, each structured in 4 lines.