Free Why was the Partridge in the Pear Tree? by Mark Lawson-Jones Page B

realms of glory,
    Wing your flight o’er all the earth;
    Ye who sang creation’s story
    Now proclaim Messiah’s birth.

    Refrain
    Come and worship, come and worship,
    Worship Christ, the newborn King.

    Shepherds, in the field abiding,
    Watching o’er your flocks by night,
    God with us is now residing;
    Yonder shines the infant light:

    Sages, leave your contemplations,
    Brighter visions beam afar;
    Seek the great Desire of nations;
    Ye have seen His natal star.

    Saints, before the altar bending,
    Watching long in hope and fear;
    Suddenly the Lord, descending,
    In His temple shall appear.

    Sinners, wrung with true repentance,
    Doomed for guilt to endless pains,
    Justice now revokes the sentence,
    Mercy calls you; break your chains.

    Though an Infant now we view Him,
    He shall fill His Father’s throne,
    Gather all the nations to Him;
    Every knee shall then bow down:

    This carol was the most famous composition by poet and hymn writer James Montgomery. Montgomery was born in Irvine, Ayrshire, Scotland on the 4 November 1771, where his Irish father John was a minister in the Moravian Church, a denomination founded in fifteenth-century Bohemia, which is now largely the Czech Republic.
    Members of the Moravian Church to this day place a high value on mission, unity, piety and music. In 1722 there was a ‘revival’ in the Church when a small group of Moravians, who had been living illegally in Bohemia were allowed to settle in what is now modern-day Germany. The town grew quickly and was seen as the centre for the mission of the Church. Hundreds of small ‘renewal groups’ were formed throughout Europe, they kept in regular contact and encouraged each other to maintain the growth in the Church.
    Within thirty years the Moravian Church had sent out hundreds of missionaries throughout the world, to the Caribbean, North and South America, Africa, the Arctic and the East. The missionaries cared deeply about those who were oppressed in the Caribbean two Moravian missionaries even sold themselves into slavery to minister to the slaves.
    When he was five years old, Montgomery’s parents moved to the Moravian settlement at Gracehill, near Ballymena, County Antrim, Ireland. At seven years old he was sent off for training at Fulneck Seminary in Yorkshire where he made a profession of faith. Then in 1783, when he was only twelve years old, his parents were sent off to the West Indies as missionaries. Sadly, not long after they had arrived, both his parents died; his father is buried in Barbados and his mother in Tobago.
    At the seminary, secular fiction and poetry were not allowed, but Montgomery found ways of borrowing and reading a large amount of poetry, including Burns and Milton. He wrote poetry of his own and planned to pen an epic poem when he was older. His school record was poor and in 1787 he was sent to work as an apprentice in a bakery in Mirfield, near Wakefield. The work didn’t suit him and he moved to Rotherham to look for an alternative way to earn a living.
    He travelled to London, hoping to find a publisher for his poetry, but this ended in failure. He did his best to support himself by any means available, usually ‘precariously and dubiously‘ until 1792, when he became an assistant to Joseph Gale, auctioneer, bookseller and printer of the Sheffield Register .
    The Register was a magazine that reported on local and national events and was set up by Gale in response to a request from Tom Paine, the famous English radical. The Register called for a free voice for all political dissenters, and campaigned against the excesses of the ruling classes. A year before Montgomery joined the Register , in 1791, Gale had given support to local artisans and small business holders who were opposed to the Enclosure Act, which meant that 6,000 acres of land was to be seized without compensation to the owners. With other campaigners, Gale continued to call for parliamentary reform. By 1794, William Pitt and his government