334. The Light of the World Is Jesus

The Story Behind the Hymn

Philip P. Bliss wrote both the words and music of "The Light of the World Is Jesus" in the summer of 1875 at his home on West Monroe Street in Chicago. By his own account, recorded by his friend and collaborator Daniel Whittle, the entire hymn — words and melody together — came to him all at once one morning as he passed through the hallway to his room, and he wrote it out immediately, essentially complete.

The hymn was first published that same year in The International Lessons Monthly, and then in Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs No. 1, the influential collection Bliss produced with Ira Sankey. It became one of the most widely sung of Bliss's hymns in the years immediately following, part of a body of work that also included "Almost Persuaded," "Hold the Fort," and "Jesus Loves Even Me" — all written in the few short years before Bliss and his wife died in the Ashtabula, Ohio train disaster in December 1876, when he was only thirty-eight.

A story recorded by the missionary leader Earl S. Taylor gives the hymn an unexpected setting far from Chicago. During a solar eclipse in Calcutta, Taylor watched hundreds of thousands of frightened pilgrims crowd the Hooghly River, terrified that a serpent of darkness was swallowing the sun. From a nearby building, he heard a small group of native Christians singing, in the middle of that panic, the opening line of this very hymn — "the whole world was lost in the darkness of sin, the Light of the world is Jesus."

The hymn's repeated refrain line, sung six times across its four stanzas, functions almost like a direct answer to exactly that kind of fear — not an argument against darkness, but a repeated naming of what has already overcome it.