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Phillip Brooks was a young minister of thirty when he visited the Holy Land in 1865. It was Christmas Eve when Brooks and several friends rode on horseback from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. It must have been exciting for that young minister to walk the streets of Bethlehem and think on those events which occurred so many years ago on the night when Christ was born. Shortly before sundown, Brooks and his friends rode a short distance east of Bethlehem to the fields thought to be where the shepherds were keeping their flocks. And later that Christmas Eve, they attended the services in the Church of the Nativity, erected in A.D. 326 by Constantine over the place where it is believed that Jesus was born. Three years after this Christmas tour of Bethlehem, Phillip Brooks wrote the words of this carol for the children in his church’s Sunday School: O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie!
