It came upon the midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
From angels bending near the earth
To touch their harps of gold:
“Peace on the earth, good will to men,
From heaven’s all gracious King.”
The world in solemn stillness lay,
To hear the angels sing.
Still through the cloven skies they come
With peaceful wings unfurled,
And still their heavenly music floats
O’er all the weary world;
Above its sad and lowly plains,
They bend on hovering wing,
And ever o’er its Babel sounds
The blessed angels sing.
Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring;
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.
Note: the later verse(s) below have been reconstructed from historical memory and may not be word-for-word identical to the original published text.
Public domain hymn text (1849). Words by Edmund H. Sears.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Edmund H. Sears, an American Unitarian minister, wrote this hymn's text in 1849 during a genuinely difficult personal period marked by both ongoing depression and physical illness, occurring at the same broader historical moment as growing and increasingly urgent national anxiety across the United States over the deeply divisive issue of slavery and the immediate lingering aftermath of the recently concluded Mexican-American War, both of which were actively straining American political and social life at exactly the time Sears sat down to write.
Unlike most traditional Christmas hymns, which tend to focus their primary attention directly on the biblical nativity narrative itself, Sears's own text instead devotes a considerable portion of its attention specifically to the ongoing suffering, division, and open conflict of the contemporary present-day world around him, deliberately contrasting the angels' ancient historical message of 'peace on earth' recorded in the Gospel narrative against what he describes, in his own more pessimistic contemporary language, as humanity's persistent, ongoing 'sad and lowly plains' and continuing 'Babel sounds' of unresolved earthly strife and division.
Sears's own personal Unitarian theological convictions differed quite significantly from the more conventional Trinitarian beliefs held by the great majority of the other hymn writers represented elsewhere throughout this same broader collection, given Unitarianism's specific rejection of traditional Trinitarian doctrine, yet the hymn was nonetheless embraced quite broadly and enthusiastically across a genuinely wide range of different Christian denominations in the years following its publication, in considerable part because its own central governing image — ancient angelic peace still stubbornly relevant to, and still urgently needed within, a contemporary world still very much actively at war with itself — resonated powerfully with congregations well beyond the boundaries of any single specific doctrinal framework or denominational tradition.
