Phillips Brooks, a young Episcopal clergyman from Philadelphia, rode on horseback from Jerusalem to Bethlehem on Christmas Eve of 1865 during a leave of travel through the Holy Land, passing the shepherds’ fields at dusk before attending a five-hour service at the Church of the Nativity that ran past three in the morning. Three years later he wrote a carol from that memory for his own Sunday School’s Christmas program and asked his organist, Lewis Redner, for a tune the children could learn by December 27. Redner struggled all week and later recalled being “roused from sleep late in the night hearing an angel-strain whispering in my ear,” jotting down the melody in the dark and filling in the harmony the next morning before church. Neither man expected the carol to outlive that single service. Brooks’s original fourth stanza, calling Christ “Son of the Undefiled,” drew complaints that it leaned toward the Roman doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and it was quietly dropped from later printings. Sung before Communion, its meditation on the little town that once received the infant Lord now turns the congregation to receive that same Lord at the altar.
Sung at Our Saviour
2025