For the last several weeks we have heard here and there the Christmas carol "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day." It's a good enough carol, but Henry Wadsworth Longfellow didn't write it so to be used. While we commemorate wise men having come from the east, it is time for wise men to go east. With yet another war looming on the Near Eastern horizon, I feel it is crucial for us to recapture Longfellow's concern and think it through.

This favorite American poet wrote his poem, which he entitled simply "Christmas Bells," at Christmas time and with Christmas very in mind, to be sure, but it was a wartime Christmas with the angry guns of the Civil War raging. It became a carol later only by deleting two stanza of his verse and rearranging the others to create a use different from his. Then it was set to a cheerful, celebratory tune appropriate only in the final stanza.

In point of fact, it begins with bitter sarcasm and descends into profound despondency before finally finding celebration.

He writes that he "heard the bells on Christmas Day," with "their old, familiar carols" being played. The words repeated are "wild and sweet of peace on earth, good-will to men!" It seemed to him that "as the day had come, the belfreys of all hristendom" rolled "along the unbroken song." The angels said it long ago, and long since all Christian churches have sung of "peace on earth, good-will to men."

The churches carry on so, he writes, until the "ringing, singing [is] on its way" to the point that one would think this war-torn world had "revolved from night to day," i.e., from the bitter reality of war to the sweet illusion of peace. Here it is: "a voice, a chime" and, constantly, "a chant sublime of peace on earth, good-will to men."

He reflects on the terrible incongruity of

celebrating "peace on earth, good-will toward men" with the tragedy of war at home and ill will toward men, even countrymen.

This New England poet draws attention to the war in a stanza conveniently withheld from the carols: "Then from each black, accursed mouth the cannon thundered in the South." We see the muzzles of the iron cannons about to hurl projectiles and not peace. His imagery asserts, "the sound the carols" give -- "peace on earth, good-will to men!" -- is "drowned" by the cannons' report.

He indicts war as the roar of cannons creating "an earthquake [that] rent the heath-stones of a continent and made forlorn the households born of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

One stanza that remains in the modern versions of the carol should alone call us short. "And in despair I bowed my head; 'There is no peace on earth,' I said." The reality is: "for hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

The final stanza redeems the despair and allows us a Christmas carol after all. Longfellow turns his disappointed attention from men and what they are doing to each other and focuses on God who sent the gospel message through the angels to the shepherds. He heard the ultimate meaning in the Christmas bells, which had escaped him: "Then pealed the bells more loud and deep." This deeper meaning he sensed: "'God is not dead, nor doth he sleep!" With this grand realization, he can conclude: "The Wrong shall fail, the Right prevail with peace on earth, good-will to men!"

Longfellow got it right. War mocks our pretense of peace on earth and good will to men. If peace is to come before Christmas bells next peal the boast, we must become sent, as the shepherds were sent, as instruments of God's peace and a nation of good will. Our mission is to spread the peace as joy to the world and to exercise our good will toward all nations and peoples.

Dr. Wallace Alcorn’s commentaries appear in the Herald on Mondays.