How sweet and awful is the place,

How sweet and awful is the place,
With Christ within the doors,
While everlasting love displays
The choicest of her stores.

Here every bowel of our God
With soft compassion rolls;
Here peace and pardon, love and blood,
Is food for dying souls.

While all our hearts and all our songs
Join to admire the feast,
Each of us cry, with thankful tongues,
"Lord, why was I a guest?"

"Why was I made to hear thy voice,
And enter while there's room;
When thousands make a wretched choice,
And rather starve than come?"

'Twas the same love that spread the feast
That sweetly forced us in;
Else we had still refused to taste,
And perished in our sin.