a) O Little Town of Bethlehem by Phillips Brooks, New York, E. P. Dutton & Company, 31 West Twenty-Third Street, circa 1887, and b) If Jesus Came To Boston, Edward Everett Hale, Boston, J. Stilman Smith & Co. 3 Hamilton Place 1894. "O Little Town of Bethlehem" is a Christmas carol with stiff wrappers, a vignette cover depicting Bethleham and a star shining over the village, with the title and "E P Dutton & Company" on the front cover, the original string binding, inscibed "Eliza S Duyer, Marion [Mass.],Christmas '89" in the front, 16 unnumbered pages of text and illustrations, E P Dutton & Company, Copyright, Lithographed and printed by Ernest Nister of Nuremberg" on the last leaf - there is no copyright date - all the edges are gilt. The lyrics were written by Phillips Brooks (1835 - 1893), an American Episcopal priest who was rector of Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia and later of Boston's Trinity Church. He visited the village of Bethlehem in the Sanjak of Jerusalem (an Ottoman district of Jerusalem) in 1865; 3 years later, he wrote the lyrics to the poem for his church, and the organist Lewis Redner added the music. According to Redner, Richard McCauley, a bookstore owner on Chestnut Street near Thirteenth Street, printed it on leaflets for sale. Then Reverend Huntington, rector of All Saints' Church in Worcester, Mass., asked permission to print it in his Sunday-school hymn book called The Church Porch, and the reverend christened the music "Saint Louis". During the American Civil War, Brooks supported the Union cause and opposed slavery, and his sermon on the death of Abraham Lincoln and at Harvard's commemoration of the Civil War dead in 1865 attracted attention nationwide. Afterwards he became rector of Trinity Church in Boston and today a statue dedicated to Brooks graces the exterior of the church, and he is honored on the liturgical calendar at the church on January 23. Ernest Nister (1841 - 1906) was a German publisher and printer, noted for his pop-up books, and he illustrated books for popular authors of the day, like Beatrix Potter, who wrote The Peter Rabbit series of books for children. The book measures 9 x 7in wide, it is very attractive, with clean pages and a tight binding, and just a smidge of a bookmark ribbon showing at the heel of the spine. "If Jesus Came to Boston" was written by Edward Everett Hale in 1894, it's 45 pages long in stiff wrappers, with gilt lettering on the front cover that shows the title and author's name, it has "1894" and Stilman, the printe's name, on the copyright page, it was printed without illustrations, and it's a first edition, according to WorldCat. Everett Hale (1822 - 1909) was an American author, historianm and Unitarian minister, best known for writing "The Man Without A Country", published in Atlantic Monthly, in support of the Union during the Civil War. He was the grand-nephew of Nathan Hale, the American sky executed during the Revolutionary War. Hale wrote the book in response to William Stead's If Christ Came to Chicago, which was a gospel treatise-an expose- about life and political corruption in Chicago during the economic depression which followed the Columbian Exposition in 1893. Stead was very judgmental and moralizing in his book, and Hale was trying to present a Boston which was much better than the reality Stead offered- it focused on helping kids and women who were living on the street and finally receiving help from the state - the Commonwealth. The state was not extravagant about meeting the needs of those people, but it was able to feed the hungry, cloth the needy, and care for prisoners who went through the court system. Stead had the view that people were going to hell in a hand-basket and Christ's plans had failed badly; Hale acknowledged that people fall back - they were much better off in someone's home than on the streets - and his view of life was much more compassionate and forgiving than Stead's. The book measures 7 1/4 x 5 3/8 in wide, with a circular spot on the front cover and corner creases and tiny dark spots at the top edge of the back cover, and still an attractive book about different Christian viewpoints when people need help. #1684 #41