In February 1889, A. B. Simpson stood before a congregation and said something that would not leave him alone: one hundred thousand souls, he told them, were dying without Christ every single day in what he called heathen lands. Simpson had already founded the movement that became the Christian and Missionary Alliance two years earlier. The number he could not stop repeating became a hymn, quite possibly the first one he ever wrote.
He called it "A Missionary Cry," and its opening line, "a hundred thousand souls a day," carries the same arithmetic of urgency that drove him to build a missionary sending organization in the first place. It first appeared in Simpson's own hymnal, Hymns of the Christian Life, sometime around 1890 or 1891, sources disagree on the exact year, and it did not stay a curiosity of its author's private grief. According to the Alliance's own academic partner at Ambrose University, it became "the theme song of the Alliance," sung at farewell service after farewell service as missionaries departed for the fields Simpson had spent his life worrying about.
More than a century later the hymn was still being printed in the denomination's 1992 hymnal. A founder's private arithmetic of loss, worked out in a single verse, outlived him by generations and became the sound an entire movement used to send its own people away.