O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by;
Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting Light;
The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.
For Christ is born of Mary, and gathered all above,
While mortals sleep, the angels keep their watch of wondering love.
O morning stars, together proclaim the holy birth,
And praises sing to God the King, and peace to men on earth.
How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His heaven.
No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in.
O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray;
Cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today.
We hear the Christmas angels the great glad tidings tell;
O come to us, abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel.
Public domain hymn text (published 1868). Words by Phillips Brooks.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Phillips Brooks was an American Episcopal clergyman, later Bishop of Massachusetts, widely regarded as one of the finest and most magnetic preachers of his generation in the United States, known for sermons delivered at a famously rapid pace yet with such clarity and warmth that they regularly drew overflow crowds to his church in Philadelphia and later to Trinity Church in Boston, where a large public statue of him still stands today.
In 1865, in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War, Brooks took an extended sabbatical trip to the Holy Land, and on Christmas Eve found himself riding on horseback from Jerusalem to Bethlehem along with a small group of fellow travelers, arriving in time to look out over the small town from a nearby hillside as evening fell and the fields around it grew quiet — an experience of unexpected stillness and beauty that Brooks later described in letters home and that stayed vividly with him for years afterward, long after he had returned to the noise and bustle of urban American church life.
Three years later, in 1868, back at his church in Philadelphia, Brooks wrote this hymn specifically for the children of his Sunday school to sing together at their annual Christmas program, drawing directly and consciously on his still-vivid memory of that quiet hillside view of the actual town of Bethlehem. He asked his church organist, Lewis Redner, to compose a simple, easily learnable tune the children could pick up quickly with only limited rehearsal time before the program.
According to Redner's own later account of the collaboration, he struggled without success to find a melody he was satisfied with for several days, growing increasingly anxious as the performance date approached, until the night before the program itself, when he said the finished tune came to him suddenly and completely, almost as though given to him in his sleep, and he got up immediately in the middle of the night to write it down by hand before he could risk forgetting it by morning. That modest children's hymn, composed by two men working under real last-minute pressure for a small parish Sunday school program rather than for any wider audience, went on to become one of the most beloved and universally recognized Christmas carols in the entire English language.
