Now The Day Is Over
Now the Day Is Over
Now the day is over,
Night is drawing nigh,
Shadows of the evening
Steal across the sky.
Jesus, give the weary
Calm and sweet repose;
With Thy tend’rest blessing
May our eyelids close.
Grant to little children
Visions bright of Thee;
Guard the sailors tossing
On the deep blue sea.
Thro’ the long night-watches,
May Thine angels spread
Their white wings above me,
Watching round my bed.
When the morning wakens,
Then may I arise,
Pure and fresh and sinless
In Thy holy eyes.
SABINE BARING-GOULD wrote eighty-five books in areas as diverse as religion, travel, folklore, mythology, history, fiction, biography, sermons, and popular theology. He wrote a fifteen-volume Lives of the Saints. He edited a quarterly review of ecclesiastical art and literature. But he loved children, and we remember him best for his children’s hymns: “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (June 6) and “Now the Day Is Over.”
After graduating from Cambridge, Baring-Gould started a church in his tiny two-floor apartment. Soon, he said, “the congregation filled the room and the stairs and the kitchen. . . . The singing had to bump down the stairs, fill the kitchen, and one strain of the tune after another came up irregularly through the chinks of the floor.”
You can go to bed without fear; you will lie down and sleep soundly.
Proverbs 3:24
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