Amidst the mighty, where is he

Written by John Morison as a metrical version of Lamentations 3:37–40 on the theme of cross and consolation, this hymn first appeared as Number 29 in the draft Scottish Translations and Paraphrases of 1781 in four stanzas of four lines. In the official public worship edition issued by the Church of Scotland later that year, the only variation introduced was a change in the second stanza from "pine" to "clothes." The text is attributed to Morison based on marginal notes made by the eldest daughter of William Cameron. From the 1781 collection, it passed into a small number of nineteenth-century hymnals, including a slightly altered version in Benjamin Hall Kennedy's Hymnologia Christiana in 1863.