Free Silent Night by Inc. Barbour Publishing Page A

live in their hearts.
    “Away in a Manger” is a lullaby to the Lord—and to the world.
    And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn
.
    L UKE 2:7

I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day
    I heard the bells on Christmas day

Their old familiar carols play
,
And wild and sweet the words repeat

Of peace on earth, goodwill to men
.
I thought how, as the day had come
,
The belfries of all Christendom

Had rolled along the unbroken song

Of peace on earth, goodwill to men
.

The Bells Still Ring
    U nderlying the joy and wonder of the Nativity is the never-to-be-forgotten fact that Jesus came to this world because we
needed
Him. Left to its own devices, humanity tends to take the downward path. This fact must have been all too painfully obvious while men fought kinsmen and countrymen in the American Civil War.
    Months away from the end of the conflict, having lost his wife and having received news of his son’s injury in battle, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow put pen to paper and wrote the poem “Christmas Bells.” Given the dreadful situation in which he found himself, it would have been understandable if his work became an ode to hopelessness.
    Longfellow
did
write about humankind’s dire condition. “And in despair I bowed my head. ‘There is no peace on earth,’ I said, ‘for hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, goodwill to men.’ ”
    Yet, despite what the poet and his country were going through, the poem is one of hope and deliverance. “God is not dead,” he wrote, “nor doth He sleep; the wrong shall fail, the right prevail.”
    Twelve years after peace was restored, John Baptiste Calkin, English composer and music teacher, rearranged “Christmas Bells.” He left out the more overt references to the war, making the message more universal, and set it to the tune “Waltham.” So a poem born at the height of a bloody conflict made the transition to Christmas carol.
    “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” is a message, sent to us through the faithful heart of a great poet, that in times of national crisis or times of personal need, the Lord (whatever anyone else may say) is there for each one of us.
    Because we needed Him, He came. And the chiming bells remind us—He is still here!
    For God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ
.
    1 T HESSALONIANS 5:9

It Came upon the Midnight Clear
    It came upon the midnight clear
,
That glorious song of old
,
From angels bending near the earth

To touch their harps of gold
.
“Peace on the earth, goodwill to men
,
From heaven’s all-gracious King.”

The world in solemn stillness lay

To hear the angels sing
.

The Angels Still Sing
    A ll times have their trials, and for the past two thousand years, all times have the answer to those trials.
    In Edmund Sears’s time the most pressing trials involved the “Forty-niner” gold rush, industrialization, and buildup to civil war. In Jesus’ time it was the dominion of the Roman sword. And today? Well …
    This gentle minister wrote a beautiful poem pointing out that no matter what our woes, the solution is right there for each of us. Ten years later Richard Storrs Willis was so inspired by the poem, he put it to music, creating one of the earliest American Christmas carols.
    Sears never mentions the Nativity, but his image of mighty angels bending low reminds us that they were there for a purpose—to announce the birth of Christ.
    In telling us the angels still hover above, singing “that glorious song of old,” Sears makes it plain that Christ is still here, or the angels would have gone home long ago!
    The problem is not God, he says; the problem is us. The world has deafened itself by the sounds of conflict until it no longer seems to hear the beautiful music of salvation.
    Come Christmastime, when the frantic shopping is done, when the family has been fed and