The hymn was written by Edmund Sears in 1849 at a time when world he lived in was anything but peaceful. The Mexican-American War had just ended the previous year which left the nation (as well as the church) shaken and divided. Tensions over slavery were increasing and within a little more than a decade the country would be engulfed in The American Civil War.

This hymn is actually a very old Latin hymn, written originally in the ninth century. Its author is unknown, and over the years it has been translated and adapted many times. Even today, there are several versions with differing numbers of verses—some drawn from the original Latin and some added by more modern writers.

This hymn is a rather romanticized image of Christ’s birth—‘Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright….sleep in heavenly peace…’ It sounds like such a peaceful, holy, glorious, clean setting. And in some ways, maybe it was. Yet in other ways it was very much not so. It was the night where the humiliation of Christ, as it is often called, began.