Angels, from the realms of glory,
Wing your flight o’er all the earth;
Ye who sang creation’s story
Now proclaim Messiah’s birth:
Come and worship, come and worship,
Worship Christ, the newborn King.
Shepherds, in the field abiding,
Watching o’er your flocks by night,
God with man is now residing,
Yonder shines the infant light:
Sages, leave your contemplations,
Brighter visions beam afar;
Seek the great Desire of nations,
Ye have seen His natal star:
Public domain hymn text (1816). Words by James Montgomery.
The Story Behind the Hymn
James Montgomery, already discussed elsewhere in this collection as the twice-imprisoned poet and newspaper editor responsible for 'In the Hour of Trial' (hymn 114), wrote this hymn's text in 1816 and published it first not in any hymnal but in his own newspaper, the Sheffield Iris, on Christmas Eve of that year, making it one of relatively few well-known hymns to have first appeared in a newspaper rather than in a dedicated hymn collection.
The hymn's structure is unusual for a Christmas carol in directly and successively addressing several different groups present at or connected to the nativity narrative in turn — first the angels who announced Christ's birth, then the shepherds who received that announcement, then in later verses the magi who traveled to find the infant Christ, and finally believers generally — each group called on in turn to 'come and worship' the newborn King, building a cumulative sense of an ever-widening circle of witnesses.
Montgomery's own personal history of imprisonment for his political and religious convictions, discussed more fully in connection with 'In the Hour of Trial,' gives this hymn's confident, celebratory tone a particular context: a writer who had personally experienced real institutional hostility for his own convictions nonetheless produced one of English hymnody's most purely joyful and untroubled Christmas hymns, apparently without allowing his own difficult personal history to color this specific piece of writing.
Henry Smart, an English organist who continued composing music even after going almost completely blind later in his career, composed the tune most commonly associated with the hymn today, and the completed work has remained a standard Christmas carol across English-speaking Protestant churches, its direct address to shepherds, angels, and sages in turn giving congregations a way of imaginatively placing themselves within the full cast of the nativity story rather than observing it only from a single fixed vantage point.
