"Ah, wretched souls who strive in vain" is an eighteenth-century Lenten hymn written by the English Baptist poet and hymnwriter Anne Steele. Subtitled "The Christian's Noblest Resolution," the text was first published in her two-volume collection Poems on Subjects chiefly Devotional (1760, Volume I, page 161), structured across five stanzas of four lines each.
The hymn quickly entered wider Protestant congregational usage. It was included in John Ash and Caleb Evans's Baptist hymn collection (1769, No. 286), where it appeared under Steele's customary pseudonym initial "T." for Theodosia. It was subsequently selected as No. 334 in John Rippon's influential Selection of Hymns (1787), through which it achieved broad adoption across Great Britain and North America. The complete text was later preserved in Daniel Sedgwick's reprint edition of Miss Steele's hymns in 1863.
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