The morning light is breaking

The morning light is breaking. Samuel F. Smith* (1808-1895). Written in 1832, the same year as ‘My country, 'tis of thee’*, when Smith was still a student at Andover Seminary. It was published in Thomas Hastings*’ Spiritual Songs for Social Worship (Utica, New York, 1834). Smith had been reading the letters of the Baptist missionary in Burma (now Myanmar), Adoniram Judson (1788-1850), who compiled the first Burmese-English dictionary and who translated the Bible into Burmese. Judson, the son of a Congregationalist minister, became a Baptist on the way to India under the influence of the Serampore mission, subsequently labouring heroically in the face of imprisonment and indifference. Many...