The great glad tidings tell:
O come to us, abide with us,
Our Lord Immanuel!
Phillips Brooks, 1868.
PHILLIPS BROOKS AND HIS CAROLS
Phillips Brooks was a great man. Not only was he a giant in stature, but he possessed a great mind and a great heart. Also, he was a great preacher—one of America’s greatest—and he just missed being a great poet. Indeed, the flashes of poetic genius revealed in the few verses he wrote indicate that he might have become famous as a hymn-writer had he chosen such a career.
His poetic gift had its roots in childhood. Phillips was brought up in a pious New England home. Every Sunday the children of the Brooks household were required to memorize a hymn, and, when the father conducted the evening devotion on the Lord’s day, the children recited their hymns. When Phillips was ready to go to college, he could repeat no less than two hundred hymns from memory. In his later ministry this knowledge proved to be of inestimable value, and he frequently made effective use of hymn quotations in his preaching. But, more than that, the childhood training unconsciously had made of him a poet!
“O little town of Bethlehem,” his most famous Christmas carol, was written for a Sunday school Christmas festival in 1868, when Brooks was rector of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. He was only thirty-two years old at the time. Three years earlier he had visited the Holy Land, and on Christmas eve he had stood on the star-lit hills where the shepherds had watched their flocks. Below the hills he had seen the “little town of Bethlehem,” slumbering in the darkness just as it had done in the night when Jesus was born. Later he had attended midnight services in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
He could never entirely forget the impressions of that sublime night, and, when he was asked in 1868 to write a Christmas hymn for his Sunday school, he put down on paper the song that long had been ringing in his mind.
The beautiful tune “St. Louis,” to which the hymn is usually sung, also has an interesting story. It was composed by Lewis H. Redner, who was organist and Sunday school superintendent of Dr. Brooks’ church. When Brooks asked Redner to write a suitable tune for the words, the latter waited for the inspiration that never seemed to come. Christmas eve arrived and Redner went to sleep without having written the tune. In the middle of the night, however, he dreamed that he heard angels singing. He awoke with the melody still sounding in his ears. Quickly he seized a piece of paper, and jotted it down, and next morning he filled in the harmony.