Composed by Augustus Montague Toplady as a Christmas hymn, this text was first published under the title "On the Birth of Christ" in his Poems on Sacred Subjects (Dublin, 1759) in eight stanzas of four lines. Although it did not attain common usage in Great Britain, abbreviated arrangements of the text were adopted into several American collections. The complete original text was reprinted in Daniel Sedgwick's 1860 edition of Toplady's Poetical Works.
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