Lorenzo Snow

"Zion Stands with Hills Surrounded"

Photo from history.lds.org

According to President Heber J. Grant (recorded in the October 1919 general conference) "Zion Stands with Hills Surrounded" was the favorite hymn of President Lorenzo Snow. 

Surprisingly, despite its many seemingly overt references to LDS doctrine, the lyrics of this hymn were penned in the 18th century, before the Restoration. George D. Pyper, fifth general superintendent of the Sunday School and a manager of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, speculated:

"The author . . . must have foreseen a condition that did not exist until seventy-seven years after he penned the lines." He added, "It was an inspired prophecy; for no Latter-day Saint could have more perfectly described the belief of the Mormon people than did Thomas Kelly back in the eighteenth century."

Learn more in Our Latter-day Hymns: The Stories and the Messages. 

If you enjoy the hymns of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, then you will enjoy Our Latter-day Hymns: The Stories and the Messages. In this volume you will find the stories of all the hymns in the 1985 LDS hymnbook, so far as those stories are known. Some of the hymns came about in ways that are quite dramatic and personal; others came into being under ordinary circumstances. And each of the more than three hundred hymns has a message all its own.