Brooks · 1865
Phillips Brooks writes *O Little Town of Bethlehem*
On the night of Christmas Eve 1865 the twenty-nine-year-old Philadelphia Episcopal clergyman Phillips Brooks rode out from Jerusalem on horseback with the congregation of the Christ Church American Episcopal Mission to attend the midnight service at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. He had come to the Holy Land on a post-Civil-War sabbatical from his Philadelphia parish at the recommendation of his bishop, was riding the five-mile descent from Jerusalem to Bethlehem through the Judean hills on a clear winter night under a substantial moon, and the impression of the Judean landscape under moonlight that he carried away from the Christmas Eve ride would three years later produce the carol *O Little Town of Bethlehem* (written at his Philadelphia desk in December 1868 for the small annual Sunday-School Christmas concert of the Holy Trinity Episcopal parish). The small carol, set to the Lewis Redner tune *Saint Louis* of December 1868 and published in the Holy Trinity Sunday School hymnal of 1869, has become the senior American-English-language Christmas carol of the post-1869 popular-Anglophone-Christmas-carol tradition.
It is shortly before midnight on 24 December 1865, on the horseback descent from Jerusalem to Bethlehem on the post-Roman small Judean-hill road, under a substantial winter moon at about minus-five degrees Celsius. He is twenty-nine years old. He is Phillips Brooks, born at the Boston Anglican-merchant household of William Gray Brooks and Mary Phillips on 13 December 1835, schooled at the Boston Latin School and at Harvard College (BA 1855), trained at the Virginia Theological Seminary at Alexandria (BD 1859), ordained Episcopal priest in 1859, and rector of the Holy Trinity Episcopal Church on Rittenhouse Square in central Philadelphia since 1862.
On the five-mile horseback ride from the Jerusalem Mar Boutros parish to the Bethlehem Church of the Nativity, in the small company of the Christ Church American Episcopal Mission party of about sixteen American Episcopal congregants and the Mission rector Henry Gillman, he watches the Judean landscape under the substantial Christmas-Eve moonlight: the olive-and-fig terraces on the Beit Jala hillsides, the Shepherd's Field plain to the east, the Bethlehem townscape on the small ridge ahead, the Church of the Nativity bell-tower rising above the market-square.
He thinks: the ride is the foundational small physical-and-landscape experience of the Christmas-narrative scriptural account. The small Luke-Chapter-Two-and-Matthew-Chapter-One nativity-and-shepherds passages are, on the immediate ride-experience, the foundational small Bethlehem-and-Judean-landscape memory that the post-1865 small Christmas-Eve sermons-and-homilies will be working with.
He thinks: the Bethlehem townscape under the moonlight, the Shepherd's Field plain, the clear-Judean-winter-night sky, are the small-scale physical-landscape elements that the American-Anglican Christmas-Eve congregants at the Philadelphia parish-back-home cannot themselves see. The small Holy-Land ride-experience is, on the working sermon-and-homily-and-Sunday-School-instruction professional output, the material that the post-1865 Philadelphia ministry-work will produce.
He returns to Philadelphia in February 1866 on the Mediterranean steamer-passage from Jaffa via Alexandria and Marseille. He resumes the Holy Trinity Episcopal Church Rittenhouse Square parish through the 1866-to-1869 working period. In December 1868, asked by the Holy Trinity Sunday School superintendent Lewis Redner to write a Christmas carol for the small annual Christmas concert of the Sunday School, he writes across the evening of 18 December 1868 the four-stanza poem that becomes O Little Town of Bethlehem: O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie; / above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by. Redner sets the four-stanza poem to a newly-composed melody on the Christmas Eve morning of 24 December 1868 (the tune he names Saint Louis for himself), and the carol is sung by the Holy Trinity Sunday School at the Christmas Eve concert of that evening. The small carol is included in the 1869 Holy Trinity Sunday School hymnal, in the 1874 Hymns Ancient and Modern American supplement, and across the post-1880 American-and-English Christmas-carol-canon publication tradition. It has been continuously sung at small Anglo-American Christmas-Eve and Christmas-morning services since 1869. Brooks served as Bishop of Massachusetts from October 1891 to January 1893 and died at the Boston residence of Trinity Church on 23 January 1893 at fifty-seven.