“Silent night, holy night.”
The songs of the glorious holiday season in a year that began in war and ended in peace reminded the men of home and family. One of the sailors remarked quietly to another: “I shall be home this Christmas for the first time in four years.”
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.