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The Brahmin Celebrity Priest Who Wrote O Little Town of Bethlehem

O Little Town of Bethlehem was written by a parish priest considered to be the greatest preacher of his day. His name was Phillips Brooks, and a visit to the Church of the Nativity in 1865 inspired him to write the beloved Christmas hymn.

Though best known for O Little Town of Bethlehem, another of his creations enjoys worldwide fame—Trinity Church in Boston.

Trinity Church in Boston

Brooks especially loved Christmas. “The earth has grown old with its burden of care, but at Christmas it always is young, the heart of the jewel burns lustrous and fair, and its soul full of music breaks the air, when the song of angels is sung,” he wrote.

And he believed that Jesus Christ was the son of God, which is why a five-hour Christmas Eve Mass in the Church of the Nativity inspired him to write O Little Town of Bethlehem.

Phillips Brooks, Author of O Little Town of Bethlehem

He was born Dec. 13, 1835 in Boston to a prosperous Brahmin family. His ancestors included the Rev. John Cotton on his father’s side and Samuel Phillips, the founder of Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., on his mother’s. His great-uncle, Peter Chardon Brooks, had more wealth than anyone else in Boston. Brooks also had a famous son-in-law: Charles Francis Adams.

Phillips Brooks at 22

His parents sent him to Boston Latin School to prepare for Harvard. He graduated from college with class members who would achieve distinction. Alexander Agassiz, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, his second cousin Henry Adams and H.H Richardson, who would later design Trinity Church.

Brooks then got a job as a school teacher at Boston Latin, but failed miserably. He got fired. So he decided to enter what became the family business: the Episcopal clergy.

The Episcopal Church

He went south, to the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Va., in 1856. Three of his brothers followed him into the Episcopalian priesthood—Arthur, Frederic and John Cotton.

New England had not embraced the Episcopal religion anywhere near as much as the South (or even New York) had. But after the War of 1812 it started gaining in popularity. Eventually it became the preferred religion of upper-class Boston ladies, according to Cleveland Amory. “This much I know,” Amory once said. “God is an Episcopalian. From Boston.”

“Although Episcopalians constitute less than 2 percent of the country’s population,” reported the New York Times in 1981, “their social and economic impact is rivaled by few other groups, if any.”

A Giant

Phillips Brooks was ordained as a priest in 1860, just in time for the Civil War. “He was very tall and well proportioned, with a full, round face beaming with health and good nature, a broad forehead, and an erect carriage of the body, with the head thrown slightly backward,” wrote the Times in his obituary. “He had the appearance of a giant, and wherever he went the people were sure to stop in the street and look after him. At 6 feet, 4 inches, he urged his parishioners to pray big. “Pray the largest prayers,” he liked to say. “You cannot think a prayer so large that God, in answering it, will not wish you had made it larger.”

Phillips Brooks

In 1862 he began seven years of service as rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia. He preached against slavery, delivered a eulogy for Abraham Lincoln and exhorted his parishioners to do charitable works.

O Little Town of Bethlehem

After the end of the Civil War, Brooks took a vacation he’d long dreamed about. He traveled across the Atlantic to Europe and then made a pilgrimage to Bethlehem.

He believed that Christianity was supernatural or it was nothing, wrote his biographer, Giles J. Harp. “For Brooks, the final, non-negotiable bedrock doctrine was the Incarnation. God the Father sending his eternal Son, the Logos, to be born a man in first-century Palestine was the heart and soul of the Christian message; without the Incarnation, there really was no gospel to preach.”

View of Bethlehem, Christmas Day 1898

Brooks described his trip to Bethlehem in a letter home:

“After an early dinner, we took our horses and rode to Bethlehem,” he wrote. “It was only about two hours when we came to the town, situated on an eastern ridge of a range of hills, surrounded by its terraced gardens. It is a good-looking town, better built than any other we have seen in Palestine…

“Before dark, we rode out of town to the field where they say the shepherds saw the star. It is a fenced piece of ground with a cave in it (all the Holy Places are caves here), in which, strangely enough, they put the shepherds…As we passed, the shepherds were still “keeping watch over their flocks or leading them home to fold”.”

Facade of the Church of the Nativity, 1940

Then on Christmas Eve, he assisted at a service in the Church of the Nativity, built over the traditional site of Jesus’ birth. The ancient basilica dated to 326 A.D.; the service lasted from 10 PM to 3 AM, wrote hymnologist Albert Bailey.

Songwriter

Brooks returned to Philadelphia in September. It wasn’t until three years later that he wrote O Little Town of Bethlehem, no doubt remembering what he had seen and felt in the Holy Land.

He asked his organist, Lewis Redner, put the words to music. Brooks told Redner that he had written a simple little carol for the Sunday school service at Christmas and wanted him to write a tune for it.

“Mr. Brooks came to me on Friday, and said, ‘Redner, have you ground out that music yet to “O Little Town of Bethlehem”? I replied, ‘No,’ but that he should have it by Sunday.”

By Saturday night he hadn’t come up with the tune. “But I was roused from sleep late in the night hearing an angel-strain whispering in my ear, and seizing a piece of music paper I jotted down the treble of the tune as we now have it, and on Sunday morning before going to church I filled in the harmony.”

Neither he nor Brooks had any idea of the popularity the song would achieve.

Boston

O Little Town of Bethlehem turned out to be a popular hit and Brooks’ farewell gift to his Philadelphia parish. Trinity Church in Boston named him pastor in 1869 at the relatively young age of 33. He became such a popular idol in that city his photograph was sold in stores. He worked hard, answered every one of his many letters and gave money to just about any poor person who asked, according to his obituary.

The rectory of Trinity Church, where Phillips Brooks died

Known the world over, he grew into one of the most popular preachers in America. He built the Trinity Church building, considered an architectural masterpiece, in Copley Square.

In 1891, he was consecrated Bishop of Massachusetts. He only held that position for a short time, as in 1891 he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 57. Brooks never married.

Statue of Phillips Brooks in Boston

You can hear O Little Town of Bethlehem here.

In the United Kingdom, people sing O Little Town of Bethlehem to a different tune—Forest Green. You can hear it here

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Images: 233 Clarendon St. By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20434478.

With thanks to Giles J Harp, Brahmin Prophet: Phillips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism. This story updated in 2022.

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Six Churches (All Gorgeous) Designed by Ralph Adams Cram

Once the most famous architect of his day, Ralph Adams Cram designed many churches, schools and libraries throughout New England. He also planned much of Princeton University, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the great cathedral St. John the Divine in New York City.

Phillips Church, by Ralph Adams Cram

Ralph Adams Cram

Cram was born Dec. 16, 1863, in Hampton Falls, N.H., to an old New England family. His parents named him for Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Adams.

He became not only a prominent architect but an Anglo-Catholic, or High Episcopalian. He also founded the Catholic magazine Commonweal. Cram headed MIT’s architecture department for seven years. In 1926, he made the cover of Time magazine.

Though an ardent advocate of Gothic Revival, Ralph Adams Cram also designed buildings in the Colonial Revival and Art Deco styles.

Cram died Sept. 22, 1942. Unlike his contemporary, Frank Lloyd Wright, his fame has dimmed. The Episcopal Church, though, celebrates his birthday as a feast day.

Here, then, are six churches designed by Ralph Adams Cram, one in each state. If you know of another, please mention it in the comments section.

Seymour St. John Chapel

In 1924, The Choate School in Wallingford, Conn., had 339 male students and a pressing need for a chapel. (John F. Kennedy would later attend Choate.)

Then-headmaster George St. John wrote in his autobiography, “To run a school without a chapel seemed like running a line for light and power without a powerhouse.”

To raise the $100,000 to pay for the chapel, alumni, parents and friends contributed, as did students who sold bricks for $5.

Ralph Adams Cram designed the chapel in the Colonial Revival style. Choate broke ground for the building in May 1924 and dedicated it in 1925.

Choate merged with a girl’s prep school in 1971 and became Choate Rosemary Hall. In 1998, the school rededicated the chapel and renamed it after the Rev. Seymour St. John, headmaster from 1947 to 1973.

All Souls Congregational Church

In 1911, a great fire destroyed much of Bangor, Maine, including the First Congregational church, which overlooked the central business district. The Third Congregational Church also burned in the fire, so the two parishes joined together to build a new church on the site of the First’s old one.

The two parishes commissioned Ralph Adams Cram, who designed an exceptionally creative (some say odd) Gothic Revival church. He incorporated flying buttresses, a rose window, a slender copper-clad spire, a small bell tower and stone from the Third’s building.

The church, which occupies a city block, once faced a row of stately homes. Today it looks across at offices, gas stations and retail stores.

All Saints Church, Ashmont

One stormy Sunday, a snow squall stranded Mary Lothrop Peabody and her husband Oliver near the small wooden chapel of All Saints in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. They were on their way from their estate in Milton to church. They had just lost a young child. Coincidentally, so had the rector of the All Saints chapel. The storm hit them on Dec. 28, 1879, the Feast of the Holy Innocents.

The Peabodys stopped in the chapel instead of forging on to church in Boston. The sermon moved them deeply. The minister preached, “Rachel, weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.”

Oliver had co-founded the investment bank Kidder, Peabody. He and Mary decided to build a new All Saints church. They, like Cram, were children of Unitarian ministers who became Anglo-Catholics, aka High Episcopalians.

The Peabodys hired young architects, Ralph Adams Cram and his partner Bertram Goodhue. They persuaded the Peabodys (or perhaps they needed little persuading) to revive the Gothic style in the design of All Saints. It was Cram’s first church. Cram biographer Douglas Shand-Tucci said of All Saints, Cram’s first church:

A significant landmark in American architectural history, All Saints’ is, of its type, Cram and Goodhue’s masterpiece, and a model for American parish church architecture for the first half of the 20th century.

All Saints Church

The Episcopal All Saints Church, Peterborough, is one of Cram’s small masterpieces, considered by some to be the most beautiful church in America. It’s set back from the road on four acres in the Monadnock Region of New Hampshire. Ralph Adams Cram modeled it after St. Mary the Virgin Church in Iffley, Oxfordshire, England.

Cram stressed local workmen and local materials – hence, he ordered the building built of granite. Some of the finest Arts and Crafts artisans in the region decorated the interior: woodcarver Johannes Kirchmayer, ironworker Frank Koralewski and stained glass artisan Charles Connick.

Mary Lyon Cheney Schofield commissioned the building in 1913 to honor her family. Her first husband, Charles Cheney, was the son of the founder of American Express. He died in 1897, shortly before their third child was born. Her second husband, Harvard professor William Schofield, died in 1920. One of her sons died in World War I. Mary lived until 1947. She, her husbands and her son are interred in the chapel.

Emmanuel Church

In the early 19th century, many residents of South Newport, R.I., couldn’t afford to attend church because they had to buy pew seats. So in 1841, three women from Trinity Church began to hold religious meetings in their homes.

Eight years later, with 88 members, they bought an empty Baptist church. Within three years, the Rhode Island Episcopal diocese admitted Emmanuel Church. The parish soon built a wooden Tudor-style church.

By the turn of the century, the old church needed repair or replacement.

Rhode Island’s prominent Brown family stepped in and commissioned Ralph Adams Cram to design Emmanuel Church in Newport. He later designed other buildings for the princely Browns.

Natalie Bayard Brown built the church in memory of her husband, John Nicholas Brown I. It took two years to build, reaching completion in 1902. Cram’s partner, Bertram Goodhue, designed the rich interior ornamentation, which went wildly over budget.

In the early 1930s, concert organist E. Power Biggs served at the church.

Today, Emmanuel still prides itself on welcoming anyone who wishes to worship.

St. James Episcopal Church

The parish of St. James was organized in the summer of 1826, when Woodstock, Vt., was a prosperous mill town that produced scythes, carding machines, woolens, carriages and tack.

It was built in time for Christmas Eve service in 1827 and consecrated the next year. The founders of the parish bought stone for the church, but discovered quicksand under the land donated for the site. They built a wooden frame church instead, and put a Paul Revere bell in the tower.

In 1907, St. James got the stone church its founders wanted. Ralph Adams Cram designed the building, considered one of his most distinguished smaller churches. He incorporated the brass pulpit and lectern, the marble font and three stained glass windows, one of which came from Tiffany studios.

If you’d like to read more about Gothic Revival buildings in New England, see our story about Henry Vaughan.

Photos: St. James Episcopal Church, AlexiusHoratius~commonswiki; Emmanual Church By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20434397; All Saints Church, By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19104034; All Saints, Ashmont By Jim Roberts – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51960817; Seymour St. John Chapel, Wallingford, Conn. By Daderot (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

This story about Ralph Adams Cram was updated in 2021.

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