Associated with “My country, ’tis of thee” will be the stirring missionary hymn, “The morning light is breaking,” the two being regarded as the foremost of Dr. Smith’s poetical works. Both were written in the winter of 1832, when he was only twenty-four years old. He was a student at Andover Theological Seminary at the time.
Altogether Dr. Smith contributed nearly 150 hymns to American hymnody, many of them on missionary themes. They were written in an era that witnessed a remarkable revival of interest in foreign missions. The famous “Haystack Meeting” at Williams College, which marked the beginning of the modern missionary movement in America, was held in 1806, just two years before Smith was born. Smith himself, while a theological student at Andover, caught the spirit of the times and felt constrained to become a missionary.
At this time reports came from Adoniram Judson in Burmah that, after years of painful disappointment and failure, the light was breaking, and multitudes were turning to Christ. Smith was fired with hopeful enthusiasm, and it was in this spirit of glad exultation that he sat down to write his immortal missionary hymn:
The morning light is breaking,
The darkness disappears;
The sons of earth are waking
To penitential tears.
Many other missionary hymns came from the gifted writer in succeeding years, and immediately after his graduation from Andover he became editor of a missionary magazine, through which he wielded a great influence. When the “Lone Star” mission in India was in danger of being abandoned because of lack of funds, Smith did much to save it by writing a poem with the title, “Lone Star.” Another missionary hymn by him begins with the line, “Onward speed thy conquering flight.” However, it does not attain to the poetic heights of “The morning light is breaking,” which has been compared to Heber’s “From Greenland’s icy mountains” in spiritual fervor and literary merit.
Another interesting hymn written by Smith during his student days is called “The Missionary’s Farewell.” The first stanza reads:
Yes, my native land, I love thee;