381. In the Land of Fadeless Day

The Story Behind the Hymn

John R. Clements was born in County Armagh, Ireland in 1868 and brought to the United States as a small child, growing up to work first as a grocery clerk before building a successful wholesale grocery business.

He came to faith in 1886 at services held by evangelist Dwight L. Moody in Binghamton, New York, and it was Moody's own song leader, Daniel Towner, who set music to Clements' very first hymn text. Clements went on to write several thousand hymns over his lifetime and later served for many years as the first president of a Bible training school in New York.

'In the Land of Fadeless Day,' also widely known by its refrain as 'No Night There,' draws its entire picture of heaven directly from Revelation 21 and 22, which describe the New Jerusalem as a 'city foursquare' with gates of pearl, streets of gold, a river of crystal water, and no need of sun or lamp because 'the Lamb is the light thereof.'

Rather than building toward a single climactic image, the hymn simply moves through John's vision point by point, one verse at a time, letting each concrete detail, the gates, the streets, the river, the light, build cumulatively toward its repeated, reassuring refrain that 'there is no night there.'

The tune was composed by Hart Pease Danks, a prolific New York composer and choir director best remembered for the popular secular song 'Silver Threads Among the Gold,' who also wrote music for a number of gospel hymns during his career.

Unlike hymns of personal struggle or repentance, this one stays entirely within John's apocalyptic vision, offering worshippers a hymn of pure anticipation rather than one working through present difficulty toward future hope.

That steady, scripture-by-scripture structure, naming one feature of the New Jerusalem after another and answering each with the same comforting refrain, made the hymn a natural fit for congregational singing, and it remained a familiar presence in gospel hymnals well into the twentieth century.