Christ, whose glory fills the skies,
Christ, the true, the only light,
Sun of Righteousness, arise,
Triumph o’er the shades of night;
Dayspring from on high, be near;
Daystar, in my heart appear.
Dark and cheerless is the morn
Unaccompanied by Thee;
Joyless is the day’s return,
Till Thy mercy’s beams I see;
Till they inward light impart,
Glad my eyes, and warm my heart.
Visit then this soul of mine,
Pierce the gloom of sin and grief;
Fill me, Radiancy divine,
Scatter all my unbelief;
More and more Thyself display,
Shining to the perfect day.
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 (1740). Words by Charles Wesley.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Charles Wesley wrote this hymn's text in 1740, intending it specifically as a morning hymn, drawing its central governing image from Malachi 4:2, which promises that for those who fear God, 'the Sun of Righteousness' will arise 'with healing in his wings,' and from Luke 1:78, which similarly describes Christ's coming in terms of 'the dayspring from on high' visiting those who sit in darkness.
The hymn deliberately layers several distinct biblical titles for Christ across its compact opening lines — 'Sun of Righteousness,' 'Dayspring,' and 'Daystar' — each drawn from a separate biblical passage, weaving them together into a single sustained meditation on Christ as the source of genuine spiritual daylight, in deliberate contrast to the physical sunrise the hymn's original morning-worship setting would have coincided with.
The hymn's second verse makes a specific, somewhat unusual theological claim for a morning hymn: that the physical return of daylight itself remains, in a real spiritual sense, 'joyless' and 'cheerless' without Christ's own separate spiritual light also present, refusing to treat the ordinary comfort of a new day's sunrise as spiritually sufficient on its own terms, insisting instead that outward daylight and inward spiritual illumination are two genuinely distinct things that do not automatically accompany one another.
Francis H. Barthelemon, a French-born violinist and composer who spent much of his career in England, composed the tune most commonly associated with the hymn today, titled 'Morning Hymn,' considerably later in 1789, nearly half a century after Wesley's original text, and the hymn has remained a standard piece of morning worship in English-speaking churches ever since, sung specifically to mark the day's beginning in a manner few other hymns in continuous use are as narrowly designed for.
