It came upon the midnight clear

Three remarkable features of this American hymn are a 1st line making it a natural choice for midnight services at Christmas; an almost exclusive focus on the words of ‘the heavenly host’ (or angels, Luke 2:13–14), or at least some of them; and an awareness of a world locked into war but longing for peace. This third characteristic has saved many occasions from being swamped by sentimentality; there is now less excuse than ever for ‘global villagers’ to speak, and sing, as if all that mattered was God and themselves.
Even as he wrote, the author knew of war and revolution in Europe and Asia; less than 10 years later the American Civil War had begun. The fact that the desire for peace is still sometimes expressed (as it was by Edmund Sears) in phrases tainted with the naivety of liberal humanism does not mean we must avoid the hymn; the apostolic model is to recapture pagan ideas and words for the gospel. The text was published in the Christian Register of Boston, Massachusetts, on 29 Dec 1849. Its editor said, with pardonable editorial exaggeration, ‘I was very much delighted with it. I always felt that however poor my Christmas sermon may be, the reading and singing of this hymn are enough to make up for all deficiencies’. The 3rd stz here may suggest ‘the teeming mass of poor immigrants in Boston or New York’ or cotton-field slaves in the South (so D and J Wright).

This soon became the first of many Christmas hymns to make their way across the Atlantic. The main change from the original, which has been made in countless books and carol-sheets, is the avoidance of ‘the age of gold’ in stz 3. The number of selected stzs also varies; the Jubilate text adopted here (except in stz 3) also adjusts the language of ‘goodwill to men’, ‘man at war with man’, and ‘ye men of strife’ (1 and 2), and omits the lines beginning ‘Still through the cloven skies they come’, and referring to the ‘Babel-sounds’ on earth. The Companion to Rejoice and Sing suggests that as peace on earth becomes increasingly elusive, ‘future editorial revision may have to be more drastic if the hymn is to retain its place’. Very soon, the 3rd millennium found America at war again, with a different kind of enemy. Meanwhile, new lines here include 2.1 and 4.5–6, the problem and its remedy not made explicit by Sears. A surviving line is 2.4; a century and a half later, dozens of hymns would include the words ‘two thousand years’; well in advance, this may have been the first.

The tune NOEL is known only as an ‘English traditional melody’. It appeared with these words in Church Hymns with Tunes adapted and arranged by Arthur Sullivan, its editor. The 5th and 6th lines are said to be Sullivan’s own; others have been variously traced to folksongs from Herts and Sussex.

b Sandisfield, Mass, USA 1810, d Weston, Mass 1876. Union Coll Schenectady, NY and Harvard Univ Divinity Sch. He was ordained as a Unitarian minister but (not uniquely in that persuasion) claimed to believe in and preach the deity or ‘absolute divinity’ of Christ. Some have dubbed him more of a Swedenborgian; this was certainly the religion of his educationalist son of the same name (1852–1942), who was also an author. EHS senr served as pastor in Wayland (1838) and Lancaster (1840) in Massachusetts, returning to Wayland in 1847 through ill health and then devoting most of his energies to writing. He co-edited the Monthly Religious Magazine where many of his hymns were first seen, and was clearly aware of the social, national and global upheavals of his time. Although only one hymn has endured, he also wrote another strong ‘Bethlehem’ text (also based on Luke 2:14, and more popular in the USA than in Britain), Calm on the listening ear of night. Among several books he wrote Athanasia, or Foregleams of Immortality (1858), The Fourth Gospel, the Heart of Christ (1872) and Sermons and Songs of the Christian Life (1875). No.362.