Christmastide Song of Blind Singers
At the Christmas season before the second World War a sale and entertainment were held in London under the auspices of the Greater London Fund for the Blind. Among the attractive features of the program during the afternoon and the evening was the rendering of Christmas carols by a company of blind singers. A London periodical, commenting on this part of the program, said that it was “especially impressive” when the chorus rendered the peculiarly appropriate hymn of Bishop Reginald Heber:
“Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,
Dawn on our darkness and lend us Thine aid;
Star of the East, the horizon adorning,
Guide where our infant Redeemer is laid.”
Blind though they were, the singers were conscious of the fact that Christ was the “Light of the world.”
This hymn was first published in 1811. Several other very popular hymns were written by the same author. Following his training at Oxford University, he became rector at Hodnet, and, later, Missionary Bishop of Calcutta, where this “man of learning and piety” lived only three years.
During this short period, however, he had the great satisfaction of hearing this and another of his hymns (“The Son of God Goes Forth to War”) sung better than he “had ever heard them sung in a church before.” This was on the occasion of the dedication of a church at Meerut, India, where in a remote situation, in sight of the Himalaya Mountains, he found an excellent organ in what he described as “one of the earliest, the largest and handsomest churches in India.”
The blind singers of London chose well when they decided to sing the hymn of this consecrated man.